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 upon, from Emacs to Facebook, from high 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 architecture.
Grady Booch, Fellow, IBM

What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? Beautiful Architecture answers this question through a collection of remarkable 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.

With this book, you'll discover :

• How Facebook's architecture is the basis for a data-centric application ecosystem
• The effect of Xen's innovative architecture on the future of operating systems
• 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 likes RVM self-optimizable, self-hosting runtime

This book includes contributions from:

• John Klein and David Weiss
• Greg Lehey
• Pete Goodliffe
• Rhys Newman and Christopher Dennis
• Jim Waldo
• Ian Rogers and Dave Grove
• Michael Nygard
• Jim Blandy
• Brian Sletten
• Till Adam and Mirko Boehm
• Dave Fetterman
• Bertrand Meyer
• Derek Murray and Keir Fraser
• Panagiotis Louridas

• On architecture
• Enterprise application architecture
• Systems architecture
• End-user application architectures
• Languages and architecture