What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? This book seeks to answer this question with a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of leading software designers and architects. It includes such topics as Facebook's architecture as the basis for a data-centric application ecosystem.
This book is a unique and essential reference that focuses upon the reading and comprehension of existing software code. While code reading is an important task faced by the vast majority of students, it has been virtually ignored as a discipline by existing references. The book fills this need with a practical presentation of all important code concepts, form, structure, and syntax that a student is likely to encounter. The concepts are supported by examples taken from real-world open source software projects. The focus upon reading code (rather than developing and implementing programs from scratch) provides for a vastly increased breadth of coverage.