The other night I was helping put into context the concepts in this book with a colleague of mine. And in the process, we both came to understand that though this book (ignoring the title) is a great architectural road map for an undescribed and predefined business issue for a three tier web based application, it is not a handbook, nor is it for an architect.



This is a book that would be a great book for someone who's building a web based application and is looking for a blueprint to follow instead of having to come up with one themself. This is mostly because of the rather heavy handed approach the author declares how a system should be built. It's always good to have a point of view, but tools for how to design are always better than the design itself for a practitioner. This book seems to provide few tools to learn how to design.



Based on that, if this book was titled differently with a different forward I would have given it a much better rating, but as it stands and the misleading nature of the title and forward, I've given it a low rating.



If you are an aspiring architect or are looking to learn more about the architectural process there are the following books, which are a good read and reference books:



A Software Architecture Primer



Beyond Software Architecture: Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)



Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises (PRO-best Practices) (Best Practices (Microsoft))



For those looking for patterns of implementation beyond "The Gang of Four" patterns book, there are the following books (I normally keep multiple copies of them):



Implementation Patterns (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)



Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)



Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)



Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)