A Philosophy of Software Design, 2nd Edition

A must have for all software engineers
Amazing book. Designing software systems are complex. There are many books and courses which teach software programming. But very few talk about design. This book is not a “How to” guide for software design, nor will it give you detailed design patterns. This book answers a profound question “What is a good software design?”. This book, with many examples, gives us a fundamental understanding of good software design. I can confidently say no other software design book tackles software design as this book does. Highly recommended, and keep this book open when writing code.

Too basic, IMO!
I bought this with high hopes, as the author is well respected, well known.I felt the content is too basic (simple) which anyone with a bit of experiencein computer-science/software-engineering would already know!

Recommended reading for new developers
Shipped quickly, in good condition, great seller communication.The book itself is concise and thought provoking. A useful read if you are looking to improve your code’s readability.

This book is clear, concise, and avoids padding for the sake of page count. This mirrors how the author advocates that software should be designed: minimize complexity, and pursue simplicity. The book lays out many strategies to achieve this goal, while also explaining how one approach reinforces and strengthens another.I found some of the examples to feel a bit academic, yet most do a good job of clarifying the concept being supported. The author has also offered rebuttals for many of the common reasons developers underinvest in software design, which hopefully helps readers confront their internalized self-bargaining techniques (some of which can be seen by reading other reviews here).My primary criticism is that I had hoped for a chapter or two about how to approach a poorly designed system and move it toward a clean design. There’s really only a few spots where even needing to make a trade-off like this is recognized, and the most prominent ends with the proposed solution being to ship the feature on the deadline and ask for refactor time in the future. This almost never happens, since there’s always another deadline on the horizon. Another place where the problem is briefly acknowledged makes the argument to always leave code with a better design than it was found in. This isn’t always possible, however, as sometimes it’s necessary to build iteratively around poor design (violating the consistency and complexity principles) before being able to eliminate it. In other words, on a large system, it’s sometimes necessary to make a mess even messier before you can clean it up. I’d love to read the author’s perspective on this facet of software design, and how to reason through such trade-offs.That said, given that my main critique is that I’d like to hear even more from the author on the topic of software design, I can easily recommend this book to every professional, or aspiring, software engineer. For more senior folks, it’ll likely be a crystallization of wisdom you’ve already learned, in a form that’ll be easier for you to socialize with the rest of your team.I, for one, would love to work on any team where the contents of this book are really internalized and applied.

Possibly my favourite tech book ever.Unlike other “clean code” books, it’s not just a collection of advice, it unfolds a real theoretical framework that embodies the perks it touts in good design: simplicity, concision, consistency and pragmatism.It felt like the author somehow found just the right abstractions to describe what we pursue in good code.All served by spot on mental models (deep modules, information leakage), simple yet precise language and telling examples.