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

1. Required Reference

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, July 12nd, 2009

   If you are involved in designing robust, maintainable and highly flexible systems then you have to know these patterns. Other books may go further with patterns now (SOA Patterns for example) but this is the first book every aspiring IT designer should read. It's about clarity and a common understanding in what is still an incredibly young industry. If you want a stimulating and rewarding career in IT and to understand what IT architects are talking about half the time then read and digest this book for a start! Highly recommended.

2. All Developers should read this

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

   With the increasing usage of higher level languages, the importance of design patterns is also increasing and this book is an excellent compendium of the patterns that you need the most.
   
   While there are a lot of patterns here that can be found among those proposed by the Gang of Four or found at Sun's BluePrints website, the explanations of the significance of the pattern and when and where it should be used makes it invaluable to programmers. The patterns covered are almost perfect in that they cover the most commonly used patterns as well as the patterns that can make the biggest difference. It's not perfect though as there are a couple of patterns that you feel were included to make up the numbers ('Money' being the most obvious offender).
   
   Incidentally, it's also a great source for disambiguation of terms too where disparate teams can use terms from this book as a common reference. Very useful when dealing with remote teams.

3. Essential reading

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, January 12rd, 2009

   Like it or not, PoEAA has become one of those must-read books. It's clear and to the point, and I'm honestly struggling to say anything bad about it. The only issue is that it's so enterprise-heavy that if you haven't worked much with Enterprise apps, you'll end up bored and/or confused from the outset.

4. Good but dated and biased towards Java

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2008

   This book has some useful patterns such as Special Case, Lazy Load and Application Controller, however for .NET developers you won't gain a great deal from this book, and a lot of the patterns/code examples are very biased towards Java. The code samples in C# you wouldn't write the way that Fowler has written.

5. Good survey, but recent development trends burdons

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2007

   Good book. Covers a lot of ground and gives a good survey of the field. Time is on its back, however. The use of web frameworks such as Struts or Spring, and the use of ORM tools such as Hibernate or JPA makes much of the book "redundant". Such tools although solving a lot of practical problems, also introduces many new ones. Maybe a new edition of the book should cover such ground.