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Title: Software Architect Bootcamp by Raphael Malveau, Raphael C. Malveau, Thomas Mowbray ISBN: 0-13-027407-0 Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR Pub. Date: 18 October, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $52.00

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Average Customer Rating: 2.38 (24 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Just a bad hash.. or is that hack.
Comment: ... Warning: too much rambling ahead.
// Read at your own risk.
...
I perused this text at length in the local bookstore. I did not find much of merit for my own personal use, but someone else might find otherwise.

I concluded that, (probably like most people that would pick up this book), I've already had a lot of the experiences outlined in the book. This includes code reviews and walk through, project planning / management, dealing with non-technical people, being a diplomat, evangelist, mentor, as well as (whoa!) being an actual developer, too.

IMHO, this book is a somewhat glib re-hash of basic material you can glean from more comprehensive sources, such as "Code Complete" (Steve McConnell, Microsoft), which is itself a codification of studies and findings from other software sages.

I think the authors put far too much emphais on particular technologies, some of which are swiftly losing relevance, ie, COM+ and ActiveX. When I saw these terms, I checked the publishing date. I expected to see 1998, but found 2001!!
I don't think that a credible text on building an architecture career should be pushing any particular implementation technology. Many technologies are not built on anything new, but are simply re-hashes of RPC, wrapped up in newer clothing... rather like the content of this book. However, in it's defense, the text did acknowledge that the most important thing is that our tech careers demand a lifetime of learning.

You can gain a lot better understanding of topics mentioned in this book by arming yourself with such texts as Code Complete, a good UML text, a good Patterns book, a lot of seasoned development experience, and perhaps even a 14 week Dale Carnegie course so you can learn to let other people think that they thought of before you did. However, you also have to be willing to step up and accept some project leadership roles, and be willing to deal with tech or non-tech people at various levels.

Postive: nice cover, not heavy, no cute graphical layout clutter, good introductory text for a non-technical manager to read.

One excellent note: the authors made a very good recommendation about how to stay on a tech path. They advise that you make your desire and goals clear to your non-tech manager, and occasionally repeat them every few months. They also warn against rising so high in the organization that you begin to be tapped for managerial roles that you don't want.

Here endeth the sermon.

Rating: 3
Summary: Uneven presentation masks a uniquely valuable book
Comment: I couldn't resist this book. Parts of it represent a clear-eyed, cards on the table look at the Software Architect job title. The introduction begins well, for example, explaining that software architects are politicians, technologists, authors, evangelists, and mentors. The description of a "marketing architecture" suitable only for PowerPoint slides is dead-on. But by page 16, the book lapses into a religious discussion of RM-ODP, Zachman Frameworks and the "horizontal-vertical-metadata" pattern, flinging information around for no discernable purpose.

But this is the first book of its kind, in my experience. Buried within are some extremely practical nuggets and an overall useful treatise on what it means to be an architect that serve to remind those of us with that title on our resumes to take pride in our work. Later chapters cover topics such as "Architecture vs. Programming," "Leadership Training," "Communications Training," "Architecture Mining," and a concluding chapter on "Psychological Warfare"--techniques for building and selling the perception that a given architecture represents the correct future course of a large organization. (I can't help but feel that one of the two authors was dumping in raw data while the other contributed insightful gems--I blame the apparent lack of an editor for the uneven result.)

Prentice Hall used to have higher quality standards. For this price, I was shocked to see so many typos, such as this from page 33: "...also we are adding some dynamic architecture elements represented metadata." In most cases, the meaning can be inferred, but here--perhaps the meaning is that the book had little or no copyediting.

Rating: 4
Summary: An overview of the field of software architecture
Comment: Judging by the title of this book, it should contain topics that represent the basic knowledge required from a software engineer must be aware of regardless of the role he plays -- software architect, designer, implementer. Indeed, this book covers topics like overview of the history of the software architecture discipline, major technologies at play, software development lifecycle, elements of software design, an extensive advise on how to handle team development risks, software design process, different aspects in the process of defining architecture, psychological techniques of survival in organization. The book is written with a ***distributed system architect*** in mind.

This book covers well the field of managing software complexity through modeling and development processes; it talks about history of different approaches to architecting and designing complex systems, about managing team development, communication, organizational risks, etc. Most of the information in this book *is* common sense and must be known to any critically thinking mature developer. I found especially interesting the information on evolution of the architectural thought.

The book has a number of shortcoming. In many places the presentation of material is sketchy and **quite boring**. Authors either skipped completely or dedicated just a few words to some topics, while they spent 20 times of that on the others. For example, the authors dedicated almost 20 pages to UML; at the same time I could not find any decent reference to RUP. The book often forces the reader to refocus, although all of the information presented in it is on the topic.

After browsing the book it is not hard to imagine the authors screaming, "It's a war out there!! If you don't buy this book, your suffering will be enormous!" :). This probably explains the chapter names: Military History, Software Architecture: Going To War, Software Architecture: Drill School. Other chapters have equally obscure names: Software Architecture: Intelligence Operations (the chapter talks about managing information), Communications Training (communicating architectural and design concepts, UML), etc. On a serious note, I have found all this not very helpful and quite annoying.

If you participate in architectural and project management activities in your organization, you should be aware of the most material covered in this book. Certain chapters could be helpful to a manager as well. This is unfortunate that the authors have failed to make the book more entertaining and readable.

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