general

I normally don't bother to write reviews, but some of the shallow ones I found here irritated me enough to write. I have been a developer, architect, and development manager. My latest project was a 100+ developer year enterprise application. Fowler clearly knows the field, he speaks with confidence of development experiences with projects that went live. I have no idea of what a newbie to enterprise application development would gain from this book. The DTO pattern, for example, is profoundly powerful and his representation of it is accurate, but he presents it in a casual, low-key way, and its significance might well escape the uninitiated. When you talk to programmers who only know the one thing they worked on you hear a naive, blind conviction in their voice, but when you read Fowler, you hear the weary lessons of hundreds of developers on dozens of large projects. If you are experienced, read chapter 8 first, then the patterns, then 1 - 7 if need be. If you are new, read chapter 8 first, then the patterns, then CODE the patterns a dozen times, then read the rest of the book. Fowler says you should read 1-8 then the patterns as needed, but I say the 8 pages of chapter 8 roll up the first seven chapters very nicely, and then please read all the patterns in associative order from your point of view.

The book is divided pretty well, the first portion of the book is a concise overview of the thinking behind most of the patterns presented later in the book, so if you don't want to read the technical details of every single pattern, the first portion of the book is a great way to get some hints as to which patterns might fit your needs. The remainder of the book focuses on the pros and cons of each approach as well as sample implementations to give you more concrete guidence on implementing the patterns (topics covered by the patterns cover a wide range of areas mostly dealing with table and object approaches for passing data, concurrency issues, and presentation layer implementations).

Most Enterprise developers have probably used at least few of these patterns for projects they have worked on, but it is nice to have a list of pros and cons of each pattern as well as additional alternatives that you might not have encountered or had a chance to implement.

This book is a must have for developers that are new to Enterprise Architecture. Advanced developers probably will not be shocked by any new / exciting revelations, but will still find the book to be a worthwhile read and a source of sound guidance.

This book is a little more implementation specific than the incredibly popular Gang of Four Design Patterns book. Many of the patterns, the Data Transfer Object pattern, for example, are fairly specific to the J2EE structural problem at hand. Other patterns, like the Lazy Load, are good architectural patterns on any platform. There is enough generic content to justify the purchase of the book for architects implementing on any platform (J2EE, .NET, PHP, etc.) but it does favor the two current platforms de jour; J2EE and .NET.

One of the nice things about the book is how the code tends to de-emphasize the application container by doing most of the work in the raw database access systems (e.g. JDBC), which makes it easy to understand what is going on but will offend the true J2EE believer. This makes the patterns in the book accessible to anyone coding in any environment, which I greatly appreciate.

One pet peeve is that some of the patterns are obvious shells for a single technique, such as the Transform View, which is really just XSLT. The text says as much, but shouldn't there be more than one example of a particular pattern in nature? It's just a pet peeve though, it's no reason to avoid the book.

Overall, the book is well written and edited and the graphics add to the exposition but are not gratuitous. It's a useful guide for anyone looking to raise the level of the enterprise application (read web application) thought up to the next level.