To be honest, good programming books are very rare. I doubt it would take more than two digit number to count great ones. If you think about it, with thousands of books coming out every year (or maybe even month)

  • that is very, very few. The bookshelves are mostly bloated with wanna-be magicians, promising all kinds of bullshit theories and frameworks that do nothing, except making existing mess even messier.

So, every time I find one of these rare great books - it brings a lot of joy. It happened again, recently and I wanted to share.

Especially large portion of stupid programming books come on those dedicated to software architecture and various frameworks, design practices. SOA and web-services in general are very popular among such books (great buzz words), of course. Huge majority of them are a waste of time, both reader\’s and author\’s.

A wonderful exception and a terrific book about SOA; or more generally - pragmatic, well-thought-through approach to designing enterprise systems is a book by Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke and Dirk Slama - Enterprize SOA, published by Prentice Hall.

I loved the book. I think it makes complete sense. And I think the authors really know what they are talking about. That\’s a very pleasant change from all the shallow talk you hear in so many books. The book ends with real-life case studies, which makes it even more interesting.

Two thumbs up and very much recommended.