Bulldozer00's Blog

I think I’ve stated it before, but in case I haven’t, I’m a subscriber of safaribooksonline.com. One of the membership benefits is called “Rough Cuts“. You’re given access to book manuscripts as they are developed, before they are published. One of the rough cuts that caught my eye is titled:

Here is the the table of contents :

Uh, say what? There’s no Part I or Part IV titled “Technical Skills” in a book with “Software Architects” in the title? Gimme a break.

Granted, the book’s overview states:

“These are the skills that are typically the most challenging for people with technology backgrounds. The book assumes that the reader already has the requisite technical skills to become an architect and as such does not focus on these types of skills.”

I’m not so naive to think that “relationship, internal, and business” skills aren’t critical for success, but if you’re gonna put “Software Architects” in the title, the highly esteemed and influential BD00 demands some sort of technical skills advice in the book. You know, like heuristics and guidance for allocating requirements to functions/patterns/packages/components/class-clusters, layering for loose coupling, leveling for balanced consistency, blueprint creation through modeling, wrestling the”ilities” into submission, yada, yada, yada. But cheeze… remove the words “Software Architects” from the title.

As you might have surmised, I didn’t read the book from cover to cover – I’m simply not that into the subjects covered in it . However, I did invest an hour skimming through the chapters. If I didn’t know what the title was, I would’ve guessed that it was something like “how to be a great executive“, “X steps to managerial success“, “moving on up in the organization“, “yada, yada, yada“. There are already a bazillion books out there that offer similar content.

One saving grace is that the book uses lots of dorky, BD00-like graphics, and it has a boatload of great quotes in it. By far, my fave is this one:

Another saving grace is that the chapter in which the quote prefaces, “Passion“, is terrific. Nevertheless, I found it ironic that the rest of the book is about how to squelch your passion by acting/behaving/operating the “way you’re expected to” in order to advance your career.