Author/s : Lee Ackerman, Celso Gonzalez
Publisher : Addison-Wesley Professional
Category :
Project Management, Process and Best Practices
Review by : Jeanne Boyarsky
Rating : 7 horseshoes
"Patterns-Based Engineering is a big thick hardcover book with three parts. The audience is mainly architects/designers with OO, UML and
patterns experience. The reader should also be comfortable dealing with abstract thought.
I had different reactions to each part so reviewing separately:
Part 1
The parts on how to generalize and look for patterns in what we do was interesting. It was approachable and I found myself scribbling in the margins.
Part 1a
There was a case study to walk you through how patterns based engineering works in practice. This was the least abstract part of the book, but it had one major problem - too much exposition on the dev team along with their names. Two pages later I was already backflipping to recall who these people are and by the next day/chapter I had no idea. Felt like I was missing something important.
Part 2
The patterns themselves are very reference like and dry. Nothing wrong with it, but didn't hold my attention. Maybe they aren't meant to be read straight through.
Part 3
I was back to being engaged and writing in the margins for the costs and benefits chapters. I think the misconceptions chapter could have been fleshed out more. Parts of it read like "X is a myth because X is not true" and could have used more examples.
---
Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in
exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
More info at Amazon.com 
1
