This book is clear, solid, and workmanlike. It could work well as a textbook, or one of several texts for a term course.



It gives a systematic introduction to several high-level notations, describing the conceptual, executable, structural (or module), and code views. Most of the notation is well-formed UML, and the authors take care to add semantic notes to every part of the graphical notation. They supplement the standard notations with a few text-based extensions. These capture requirements, archtiectural decisions, risks and risk mitigation, and other operating features of a living software project.



One real asset is the related set of brief case studies at the end of the book, three separate products with a common conceptual base. This book is aging, it dates back to 1999 - five years, as I write this. That's old in the "architecture" literature, and the authors fail to apply the "product line" notion. I take this book for its good, though, and lack of one buzzword is a small enough fault.



The book uses a process-and-pipe model pervasively for architectural description. It's a good tool, but other tools are good for other purposes, and their omission is a problem here.



Still, the book is competent on the whole. Its sustained product-line example ties the whole together, and it focusses on practice intead of mainfestos and brand-name methodologies. There's a lot of good here, and you can pick out out easily.



//wiredweird