Release It!: Design and Deploy
Production-Ready Software
(Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael
Nygard
Makes You Think About Recovery Oriented Software
Whether its in Java, .NET, or Ruby on Rails, getting your application ready
to ship is only half the battle. Did you design your system to survivef a
sudden rush of visitors from Digg or Slashdot? Or an influx of real world
customers from 100 different countries? Are you ready for a world filled
with flakey networks, tangled databases, and impatient users? If youre a
developer and dont want to be on call for 3AM for the rest of your life, this
book will help. In Release It!, Michael T. Nygard shows you how to
design and architect your application for the harsh realities it will face.
Youll learn how to design your application for maximum uptime,
performance, and return on investment. Mike explains that many
problems with systems today start with the design.

Personal Review: Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-
Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael Nygard
I've recommended this book to many colleagues of mine and haven't heard
a disappointing review to date. I've heard the terms `pessimistic' and
`realistic' used with equal frequency to describe this book. Having just
completed my second reading, I can affirm that these terms are both
representative take-aways. Nygard openly admits to being more than a bit
paranoid about the way he approaches enterprise application architecture.
Although this may seem alarming to many new to the IT field, those of us
who have been around for a while recognize this as a necessary, at times
life saving, defense mechanism.
Despite the presence of patterns, this is not really a pattern book that can
be read piecemeal. It's best read and enjoyed end-to-end. The books
serves to teach us old dogs some new tricks as well as serving as a way to
say "welcome to the field of enterprise application architecture" to team
members new to this role.
Book Strengths
--------------
* Real world production incidents, just in case you think: (a) you're the only
one who ever gets into such situations; or (b) such things don't happen in
the real world with large enterprise applications (where do you work?)
* The patterns. Even though there's no sample code, the real value is in
describing and cataloging these patterns.
Book Weaknesses
---------------
* Organizational inconsistency. Two sections of the book (Stability and
Capacity) follow the anti-pattern / pattern approach while the other sections
of the book (General System Design and Operations) follow more of a
narrative approach.
Yeah, the book focuses almost entirely on Java-based systems but almost
all of the book has direct applicability to other enterprise technologies. In
the last chapter of the book, Adaptation, Nygard's writing style tends to
wander a bit and deviate towards a rant. However, it's hard to fault him for
this, especially when he states things so eloquently:
"Real enterprises are always messier than the enterprise architecture
would ever admit. New technologies never quite fully supplant old ones. A
mishmash of integration technologies will be found, from flat-file transfer
with batch processing to publish/subscribe messaging. Any strategy
formulated predicated on creating a monoculture--whether it is a single
integration technology or a single programming language--is doomed to be
a costly failure."

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