Microsoft® .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise , Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello
I found this book on Amazon and was attracted to it by the name and Dino’s name. I haven’t read one of Dino’s books for several years (I think his Xml book was the last one I read).
This book targets the experienced .Net developer and/or beginner architect. If you are not familiar with design patterns, you might want to check out some of the related books I listed below first.
The book has two sections: Principles and Design of the System.
The Principles section is a pretty quick review of some fundamentals such as UML, OO design (object oriented) , AOP (aspect oriented programming) design, testability, separation of concerns, dependency injection, patterns (high level) and such.
The second section (Design of the System) is the majority and best part of the book. On a high level it covers the pros and cons of a layered system architecture using some code (from the Northwind Starter Kit project on codeplex) to show (somewhat) real world examples. The second section is made up of four parts covering the pro/cons and tradeoffs you run into when architecting the different layers: Business Layer, Service Layer, Data Access Layer and Presentation Layer.
After reading this book from cover to cover, I would definitely recommend it to beginners and experienced developers … but not necessarily architects (the over 40 and over confident type architects anyways). For the beginner – you can really get a sense of the things you should focus on learning. For the experienced developer – you will learn some new things, be reminded of others that you once knew and will be provided enough information to get you started to dig into some parts you might not know yet. If you have read all the books in the related books listed below – you might like this book because it provides its details from the code base of an actual working project (the NSK) – so you have a complete working example (instead of some out of context code snippets).
In summary, if you are a beginner looking for a book to help guide you in how to become an architect in a number of years or an experienced developer looking for a book that describes the pros/cons of a layered enterprise application – then you should check this book out.
Related books: