The people at Packt asked it again: “Do you want to review this book?” Sure I do! The book I’m reviewing this time is ASP.NET 3.5 Application Architecture and Design, written by Vivek Thakur.
Application Architecture is always an interesting topic to read on. Different people have different opinions, there is no one perfect solution to a problem, … This book covers application architecture, applied to ASP.NET, although these concepts can be applied in any application. Questions like “What are tiers?” and “How do you structure an application?” are dug into in the first few chapters. The next chapters focus on more specific areas of application architecture: the domain model, UML, creating an ER diagram, SOA, the ASP.NET MVC framework, … Each of these concepts is explained using a single project example, which makes it easy to see the differences, pro’s and con’s of a certain solution.
To be honest, I don’t think this book is something for experienced architects or lead developers. More experienced architects will probably remain a little bit hungry because large, complex, real-world architectures are not covered or illustrated. The book covers all concepts of application architecture using a simple example, which makes them clear to any developer who is interested in architecture but has always been affraid of all these concepts.
If you are familiar with the words “N-Tier”, “domain model” and other architectural concepts, I think this book might not be covering architecture deep enough. Are you a developer wanting to release some open-source software? Unaware of the concepts mentioned? Then read this book as it is a great starter book.