Beautiful Architecture - New from O'Reilly

For Immediate Release
For more information, a review copy, cover art, or interview with the
authors, contact:
Kathryn Barrett (707) 827-7314 or kathrynb@oreilly.com

Beautiful Architecture - New From O'Reilly
Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design

Sebastopol, CA--What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and
maintainable software architecture? "Beautiful Architecture" (O'Reilly, US
$44.99), edited by Diomidis Spinellis and Georgios Gousios answers this
question through a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen
of today's leading software designers and architects. In each essay,
contributors present a notable software architecture, and analyze what
makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose.

Some of the engineers in this book reveal how they developed a specific
project, including decisions they faced and tradeoffs they made. Others
take a step back to investigate how certain architectural aspects have
influenced computing as a whole. With this book, you'll discover:

- How Facebook's architecture is the basis for a data-centric application
ecosystem
- The effect of Xen's well-designed architecture on the way operating
systems evolve
- How community processes within the KDE project help software
architectures evolve from rough sketches to beautiful systems
- How creeping featurism has helped GNU Emacs gain unanticipated
functionality
- The magic behind the Jikes RVM self-optimizable, self-hosting runtime
- Design choices and building blocks that made Tandem the choice platform
in high-availability environments for over two decades
- Differences and similarities between object-oriented and functional
architectural views
- How architectures can affect the software's evolution and the
developers' engagement

"Beautiful Architecture" brings you behind the scenes to learn what it
takes to design elegant software architecture, and how it can shape the
way you approach your own projects.

"The authors do a wonderful job in covering some of the fundamentals and
best practices of software architecture, and they do so while also
covering a wide spectrum of contemporary systems. I particularly enjoyed
the range of architectures they touch on, from Emacs to Facebook, from
higher ceremony systems to more ethereal ones.

"In short, this is a very timely and useful contribution to the art and
the science, and the practice of software and architecture."
- Grady Booch, Fellow, IBM

For more information on this topic, be sure to check out O'Reilly's Web
2.0 Expo, taking place March 31 through April 3 in San Francisco:
http://web2expo.com/sf

For more information about the book, including table of contents, index,
author bios, and samples, see:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517984/

Beautiful Architecture
Edited by Diomidis Spinellis and Georgios Gousios
ISBN: 978-0-596-51798-4, 404 pages, US $44.99
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000
http://www.oreilly.com
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472

About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books,
online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media
has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in
on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by
amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the
future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has
a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

# # #

O'Reilly is a registered trademark of O'Reilly Media, Inc. All other
trademarks are property of their respective owners.