Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is one of the many interested books written by Martin Fowler. I have a lot of respect for Martin, mainly because he’s able to constantly challenge himself and improve his craft, since several decades. Here is what I like and dislike about this book.
A bit hard to read
Like Eric Evans, Martin Fowler has tons of interesting things to say. Unfortunately, both have a style hard to read. Mainly because it is dense in terms of content, but also because it is not concise. Let me be clear: I don’t pretend by any way to be a better writer than them. I just consider what they write as much interesting as it is hard to read.
Not totally up to date
Because the book was written around 2000, with many technical details, some of the patterns described are no longer relevants. Which is not that bad, because it gives an historical perspective. For instance, it was released when OOP was kind of marginal, and patterns like ORM were not widely spread. It is interesting to see what were the alternatives, and how OOP was perceived before to be mainstream.
A must read stay a must read
This book has greatly influenced our industry in the last decades. From this perspective it is still valuable, because it helps to understand what IT looks like in the 2000s, and how it evolves. The book contains also some seeds of the original ideas behind the emergence of Domain Driven Design, such as the Domain Model pattern. It allows to understand the original link between Domain Model and OOP, and thus the influence of OOP in the mythical blue book by Eric Evans.
Thank you Martin for this book and what you do for IT since many years.
Hi Emilien. Great book ! Fowler is a master. A “must read” OOP book is “Conception et programmation orientées objet” by Bertrand MEYER. MEYER is simply one of this man that have done this languages we use every day, like C#, C++ or Java – he is one of the fathers of OOP and managed execution environments. It is “the” book, for me. It goes to the root of the software design principles and object concepts with a precision i’ve never found anywhere. The book is 1300 pages long, and the most conceptual one are simply awesome : I can say that while we haven’t read this pages, we are not completly aware of what is OOP. – Bien à toi.
Thanks for the feedback. To be honest I think more about the SmallTalk team, especially Alan Kay as the “fathers” of OOP. But it’s true that I haven’t read Meyer’s book so far, despite it is in my “to read” list for a while 🙂
I’ll need to fix it soon!