Customer Reviews
Essential reading - By: Dmitri Sozin, 03 Jan 2009 
Like it or not, PoEAA has become one of those must-read books. It's clear & to the point, & I'm honestly struggling to say anything bad about it. The only issue is that it's so enterprise-heavy that if you haven't worked much with Enterprise apps, you'll end up bored and/or confused from the outset.
Good but dated and biased towards Java - By: Mr. Rd O'donnell, 15 Dec 2008 This book has some useful patterns such as Special Case, Lazy Load & Application Controller, however for .NET developers you won't gain a great deal from this book, & a lot of the patterns/code examples are very biased towards Java. The code samplesin C# you wouldn't write the way that Fowler has written.
Good survey, but recent development trends burdons - By: Kasper Graversen, 27 Jul 2007 Good book. Covers a lot of ground & gives a good survey of the field. Time is on its back, however. The use of web frameworks such as Struts or Spring, & the use of ORM tools such as Hibernate or JPA makes much of the book "redundant". Such tools although solving a lot of practical problems, also introduces many new ones. Maybe a new edition of the book should cover such ground.
Useful but J2EE biased - By: C. Jack, 30 Jul 2006 I'm a .NET developer and, since the book advertises the fact that it covers .NET as well as J2EE I had high hopes. By & large it lived up to them butin some places I think it let itself down.
In particular the majority of the code isin Java. I don't mind mentally mapping from Java to C#, however its the differences between the framework libraries that creates the problem as I simply cannot do that mapping.
Despite this the book is OK, if you concentrate on the patterns themselves then your fine but I think Java developers will get far more from it as they're going to learn not just the patterns but details you need to be aware of when applying them.
key book for enterprise patterns - By: Thing with a hook, 29 Jul 2006 Even if you find enterprise stuff immensely dull, dealing with databases & web pages is a pretty common task, most of the actionin software development revolves around it, & who wants to be completely ignorant of the the alphabet soup of various technologies the IT blogs, books & websites are floating in?
So if you must immerse yourselfin this area, what better than a Martin Fowler book? The code is mainlyin Java, with a fairly large smattering of C#. It would probably help if you understood some basics of enterprise developmentin those languages, e.g. servlets & JDBC for Java.
The patternsin this book cover organising domain logic, database mapping & access, web presentation, concurrency, & the book finishes by covering base patterns, a mixture of lower level abstractions of the sort coveredin Fowler's first book Analysis Patterns (e.g. Money) & those that bear a close resemblance to the classic vanilla Gang of Four patterns, with an enterprise twist (e.g. Plugin & Gateway). Nearly all the other patterns refer to these, so I don't know why these didn't appear first. Apart from that though, the book is very well organised. And the opening essay, that discusses the trade offs of every pattern & how they fit togetherin an application, is immensely helpful.
Wizened enterprisers looking for new material will not find much new here, but surely the point of patterns catalogues are to get down on paper the practices of those same wizened enterprisers, not to strike offin new directions. Therefore, an experienced developer should see this as a way to organise what they already know, & maybein doing so, reveal some new insights.
A newcomer to enterprise development will definitely get a lot out of this, as the underpinnings to the plethora of modern enterprise applications are laid bare. You're not going to become a Hibernate, Struts or EJB expert from this book, but you should at least have a clue about what problems they're trying to solve.
As usual, Fowler manages to be a model of clarity, while still injecting regular touches of wry humour, quite an achievement given the potentially bone-dry material. If you want to know the basics of enterprise software, start here.
