In this truly unique technical book, today's leading software architects present valuable principles on key development issues that go way beyond technology. More than four dozen architects -- including Neal Ford, Michael Nygard, and Bill de hOra -- offer advice for communicating with stakeholders, eliminating complexity, empowering developers, and many more practical lessons they've learned from years of experience. Among the 97 principles in this book, you'll find useful advice such as:

• Don't Put Your Resume Ahead of the Requirements (Nitin Borwankar)

• Chances Are, Your Biggest Problem Isn't Technical (Mark Ramm)

• Communication Is King; Clarity and Leadership, Its Humble Servants (Mark Richards)

• Simplicity Before Generality, Use Before Reuse (Kevlin Henney)

• For the End User, the Interface Is the System (Vinayak Hegde)

• It's Never Too Early to Think About Performance (Rebecca Parsons)

To be successful as a software architect, you need to master both business and technology. This book tells you what top software architects think is important and how they approach a project. If you want to enhance your career, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know is essential reading.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 20 Ratings

incoherent and useless - 2009-12-25
Reviewer Rating:
Why does a famous (and, he has proven it, excellent) technical writer dare to compile
such a useless, incoherent and impractical amount of pseudo-advice?

His other books provided deep technical knowledge and practical help.

This one's not worth its price - there are much better books available...

alternatives: Taylor et al: Software Architecture (Foundations, Theory and Practice): Great read.
Bass et. al: Software Architecture in Practice: Great read.
Buschmann et. al: Pattern-oriented Software Architecture: Great series.
Fowler: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture: Great, highly practical...

So - don't bother with this one, go get a good book :-)

I didn't finish - 2010-02-06
Reviewer Rating:
(The following won't be completely fair because I feel unable to write a book such this one)
Although I was interested about the subject I felt bored after reading the first few pages. Each chapter seemed a repetition of the others. So, I suppose that I expected something either more personal (e.g. kind of war stories) or more technical (i.e. how to document such and such)... something like "coders at work" or "beautiful code", or something like "Elements of programming"...

I will try to read it again in a few months. All the books deserve a second chance.

97 Valuable Discussion Points - 2010-01-12
Reviewer Rating:
If you buy this book expecting 97 in depth dissertations on software architecture & design, you will be disappointed. It is instead, a collection of observations on the relationships between business, people and technology. This is not a tome that one sits down and reads in a day, acquiring all of the knowledge of the collected contributors in that instant. It is instead a book, which is best read a chapter or two at a time, and discussed amongst your colleagues. Some lessons you will be able to implement immediately, some will not be of value to you ever. Many deal with issues that (as one would expect) will help to make your life easier if implemented in the planning stages of a project. The only thing I would change so far would be to change "Your Customer Is Not Your Customer" to "Your Customer Is Not Your Only Customer" or "Everyone Is A Customer".

I give it 4 stars instead of 5 because as others have noted, it is very lightweight. I do feel that this book would be suitable for most folks in technology to read, not limited to software architects. I would have no hesitation recommending this book to everyone from a Junior Systems Administrator or Project Manager all the way to a Director Of Technology.

a collection of experience and wisdom - 2009-11-12
Reviewer Rating:
this book talks about different experiences of people, what they did wrong and what we can learm from them. this book did teach me a lot and would recomend this to be a must read.

Real world advice. - 2009-09-19
Reviewer Rating:
Real world architecture advice from real world architects. Some of the suggestions are really good. Gives you some insight into an architect's mind.

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