Design Patterns in Communication Software

Rating:
Summary: Disappointment
Review: Disappointment

I will begin in that: If the book did not have the third part of
Dr. Schmidt, that book would be rated *zero* stars !!!
The following sentences are concerned to the first and second part
of the book:
Patterns ??? I disagree ! Describing a *very* general problem and
telling something like "Try to do it better", is not helping at all !
Maybe the material is immature, or just written very bad.
Not organized at all. I couldn't tell what the... the writer wanted
to explain ! many of the details not interesting simply because there are
not attached to any subject of the specific chapter. It was like reading
a student work (student that miss all the classes).

The third paragraph is very good. You cannot miss a good article of
Dr. Schmidt (The father of ACE).The articles are an
updated version of Dr. Schmidt web-site-articles (The problem was that I have already read all most of his articles before ...).

Conclusion: Take the money and run.

Rating:
Summary: Same tired BS repackaged and resold -- once again
Review: Doug Schmidt is an amazing guy: he seems to have decided to keep reselling the same clumps of his ACE junk till the rest of his life, drawing a steady prebend from it, whereas it's very clear that, even regardless of the original merit of this product, it's time to let go of the benefice. Haven't we learned this Reactor/Acceptor drivel by heart already? Well, if not, it's here again. It's gotta be now what, the fifth book with it? Or more? Not counting papers... Quit milking this cow, dear Professor!

And yet, that's the better part of the book, actually. How many times do I need to read about the HOPP pattern? Is it a strike of genius or something? It was published at least five years ago in the first pattern-collection book, and it didn't become any less uninteresting now. Well all right, there's one piece there that perhaps is somewhat curious: Greg Utas's "Pattern Language of Call Processing" (a very narrow domain, but considering the rest, not bad.)But that's it; the rest is just a load of tripe, sometimes simply unreadable.

This patterns stuff is brazenly overhyped. There's one and only decent book on this very simple topic -- the original Gamma et al. one. Get it, understand the idea, and be done with it. It's amazing how these parasitical professors and their graduate-student flunkeys simulate high science. They take some nonsense (or, at best, something very trivial), write it up in a most abstruse, pretentious language, add a bunch of ponderous diagrams, and shamelessly push the results -- over and over again! -- as some kind of very important scientific discovery.

This book, there's nothing to it, zilch ...other than a most regrettalble waste of dead trees. Let it be safely remaindered.

PS. I find the first review on this page (the five-star one) suspicious: I've checked out this guy's reviews page and it seems like he reads inhumanely huge numbers of technical books -- and has never met a book he didn't like; nearly all are five stars. That can't be. Looks like what we have here is a professional a work.

Rating:
Summary: Long overdue - excellent resource
Review: This book is divided into small- and large-collections of design patterns, and experience reports, all of which comprise an important body of work supporting one of the most demanding development environments. The patterns that I found most valuable, as well as most applicable to any communications-based architecture are: fault-tolerant telecommunications system patterns (the frameworks that can be mined from the patterns can be tailored to just about any kind of system), and call processing patterns (again, these are applicable to systems outside of the telecommunications domain because they distill complex interrelationships, events and processing requirements into coherent patterns that can be employed in systems that are equal in scope and complexity), and patterns for logging diagnostic messages. In addition, the experience reports in Part III are incredibly valuable to any developer or development organization because they give insight into some of the most challenging problem/solution sets and lessons learned that you're likely to encounter. My favorites are: managing change with patterns, OpenWebserver, and applying design patterns to flexible configure network services in distributed systems. Given the movement towards M-Commerce, extending the enterprise applications suites to PDAs and web-enabled phones, the design patterns will have direct- and indirect-applicability to organizations developing for these environments. Of course, in the telecommunications industry these patterns are directly applicable across the board. This is an important work that provides the collective knowledge and experience of some of the telecommunication industry's best and brightest. For the intended audience and the secondary audiences that I cited this book is one of the most valuable resources a development organization can acquire.