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Monday, June 18, 2012

Architecture of Open Source Software



Authors of over four dozen open source applications explain the architecture of their software and their design decisions, in a set of two books that are freely available under a Creative Commons license. Find them here: "The Architecture of Open Source Applications".   

In the introductory chapter, Amy Brown and Greg Wilson explain the intent of the books: 

"Building architecture and software architecture have a lot in common, but there is one crucial difference. While architects study thousands of buildings in their training and during their careers, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well. And more often than not, those are programs they wrote themselves. They never get to see the great programs of history, or read critiques of those programs' designs written by experienced practitioners. As a result, they repeat one another's mistakes rather than building on one another's successes."

"This book is our attempt to change that. Each chapter describes the architecture of an open source application: how it is structured, how its parts interact, why it's built that way, and what lessons have been learned that can be applied to other big design problems..."

3 comments:

Venugopal Balu said...

Thanks Ravi for this useful post

Jessica said...

Great share of information. The book's content is also very interesting to study the history of Architect and its benefits. Thank you.

Architecture Software

Graphisoft Australia said...

Yay! Two great books that I need to buy, Greg Wilson and Amy really know how people think.. a big fan here! Anyways, their introductory chapter made me feel more excited! I wonder what great ideas and thoughts again that they shared though I'm not that professional of architecture software but it would be a great pleasure to learn from them. :)

By the way, I had this cool software from http://graphisoft.com.au/. You should have one! really!