史蒂文 :: Release 2.0

The next book I am going to read is Enterprise SOA.

The interesting thing about it though is that one of the case studies focuses on IF, part of HBOS here in Scotland. However, a couple of friends on mine worked on that project and both have the same story - that the architecture wasn't quite a SOA as this book says it is (we had a sneek peek due to the interest). What may be there is a high level view of what would have been the ideal, but as far as I am aware, the implementation wasn't quite as powerful as has been made out.

However, I have yet to read the book, so that case study in particular will be interesting for me to draw myown conculsions. I't supposes to be the best SOA book out there just now - I sure hope so!
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I literally just finished reading Design Patterns by the Gang of Four. This is probably the seminal book on patterns, written over 10 years ago, yet still widely referenced.

I had never read it (my C++ isn't great and my SmallTalk is non existent), but I had read so many things referencing the book that i decided to go for it. It was very powerful in that it helped me understand patterns i had used myself without understanding the full details of them and also gave me a view to how to create, resume and morpth patterns in the future.

If there is any downside to it, it's that at random parts through the book they touch on abstract concepts or use terminology that isn't excatly straightforward is you're not in academia (e.g. Directed acyclic graphs). They also tend to jump some parts of the discussion assuming you know what they are talking about - i sometimes didn't. The problem thateafter is that you struggle to understand the latter parts of the chapter. However, admittedly on a few occassions, re-reading the chapter three or four times allowed me to fill in things at the start that were discussed later in the chapter. Refactoring the chapter i guess :)

However, it takes nothing away from the book itself. You can use the book along with the web now to really understand how the patterns work anyway - however, with the book at hand you can also understand some of the fundamental ideas that went into these patterns (summaries of patterns have their good and bad points, where is where the book is useful).

The reason I read these in the first place is so that the architecture I am creating for my home project will actually scale up. I have already started to put patterns to work in my consultancy role, not in the way I used to, but with a much greater grasp of what i am doing and exactly how they can be combined. This is probably easier as I have used them for a few years now (without necessarily understanding them), but I still feel I have learned a great deal that has started me thinking about patterns in all sorts of areas.

I'd like pointers to User Interface patterns and experiences if anyone has them; especially web driven interfaces.
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