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

1. Comprehensive and Brilliant

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2009

   Along with Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture, this book holds the core knowledge for developers looking to get more involved in design and those looking to step up as an Architect in an environment that involves some level of messaging.
   
   I came to this book while working on a project that required two disparate databases to be synchronised. The initial painful experiment of polling for changes was thrown out and we moved to an efficient event-based system using a message queue. Using this book allowed us to side step many issues (such as mutating table errors) and also provided us with a syntactically reference which created a common vocabulary. Such a simple thing but it saved hours of time as we were all aware of what each other in a large team mean when we discussed such things as Message Channels, Idempotent Receivers, Content Enricher and Even-Driven Consumers.
   
   As a tip, I would recommend that all Java developers download Apache Camel which was designed around these patterns. This allows you to see first hand how and why these patterns are so useful and really compliment the book.

2. Huge time saver for ESB users

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2009

   If you plan to use a Enterprise Servive Bus, don't be scared by the page number of this book, because this read is going to save you a lot of time.
   
   Very well written, sometimes some repetitions, gives you the broad view and the terminology which will help you find your way in the ESB world.

3. Not dated much at all

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2009

   This book first hit the streets in 2004, when EAI hype was in full swing and MOM was seen as a bit of a silver bullet. Thanks to the subsequent over-promotion of SOA (anyone noticing a pattern?) and many poor messaging implementations a lot of the good ideas have been a bit sidelined.
   
   I've just purchased the December 2008 reprint of this book and frankly it's as valid today as it was when it came out. Messaging as an implementation style may not be quite as popular, what with the rise of data/compute grids etc, but problems and patterns are largely timeless. As a handbook for enterprise integration I haven't seen a better guide. I give it four stars only because I'd like to see a new edition that deals with integration around contemporary approaches like cloud and mega-scale patterns like map/reduce.
   
   I paid just under thirty quid, which is slightly above average for a tech book but worth every penny when you think a few dodgy design decisions would cost your company vastly more to fix.

4. Highly relevant to the modern web developer

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, November 12rd, 2008

   As a web developer working outside "the enterprise" (CTO at Dopplr, the social network for smarter travel), I was initially put off from this book by its title. However, after it was recommended to me at a conference, I took a look and was very impressed.
   
   Its approach to systems architecture - the decomposition of serverside applications into small pieces, loosely and asynchronously joined - is a great fit for modern Web 2.0 apps. I've incorporated many of its ideas into the architecture of Dopplr, and I have referenced it often in my conference presentations.

5. Great overview and reference

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2008

   This book is a great overview of what can be achieved with MOM. If you are new to integration/messaging, as I was, this book is an invaluable resource to get you up to speed on the major concepts and challenges faced by developers using this technology.
   The book is vendor independent, although a lot of examples are shown for JMS or MQMQ, the concepts could easily be applied to other MOM technologies such as WebSphere MQ.