Product Description: Noted software engineering expert, Martin Fowler, turns his attention to enterprise application development. He helps professionals understand the complex--yet critical--aspects of architecture. Enables the reader to make proper choices when faced with a difficult design decision.
Misses out on the important patterns This book is a complete beginner's handbook for enterprise patterns.
1) The "Mapping to Relational Database Patterns" section discusses patterns that are completely intuitive. I recall logically coming to this conclusions when I started programming in Visual Basic in 99. Nothing new in this section.
2) The "Concurrency" section is criminal in nature and assumes that the application runs on high-cost server. Process-per-session? Thread-per-request? Come on!! Has the author missed out on the Reactor, Proactor and Active Object patterns (he does reference ACE but only as a reference). These patterns have been recognized as not scalable in the late 90s.
3)The distribution patterns are clearly incomplete and desire a lot of details.
If you're just starting out,as a System Architect :-), you'll find this useful. Otherwise, use MSDN or ACE for enterprise patterns.
Must have reference for all developers Even if you don't do "Enterprise Application" development, this book is a must have in your library. If you have been developing for more than a couple of years and you haven't seen 1/2 of the patterns in this book, then you are probably doing something wrong and this book could greatly help you.
Even if you do know 1/2 or more of the patterns in this book it is a great reference to the details of these patterns. Unless you are a Sophomore Software Engineering Student I'd recommend this book over the GoF book. Gof is a must have too, but if you can only have one. Get this one!
Must read This is a must read book if you are a developer, architect or in anyway related to technology.
Great reference for building business apps For me, this book is an invaluable reference for building business apps.
Want help choosing a framework? Want some guidance for solving common business problems? These patterns help solve these kinds of problems.
NOTE: I have tried to find other sources for these patterns, and I have only found Fowlers website, which is really only a summary and recommends purchasing the book.
This book has examples in both Java and C#. You can certainly use these patterns in .NET.
Under .NET you are not actually forced to use the Table Model. I think the purpose of this book is to help you realize this.
There are frameworks for .NET that use the Domain Model and Data Mapper patterns, but you would never know this unless you were familiar with the patterns in this book.
For me, reading this book didn't allow me to write new code, but it did allow me to understand my choice to use a particular framework/technique over another.
Educates you on Enterprise Architecture As a newcomer to enterprise architecture this book educated me on possibilities for decisions to be made in designing an enterprise architect. It will also give you a language for describing existing characteristics of an existing enterprise application which may use some combination of the patterns describe in this book. The discussion of where to keep session state for a webapp was particularly helpful to me.
Anything Goes Trivia
Last Kiss
Megaton Man
Trevor
