This is a practical guide for software developers, and different than other software architecture books. Here's why:

It teaches risk-driven architecting. There is no need for meticulous designs when risks are small, nor any excuse for sloppy designs when risks threaten your success. This book describes a way to do just enough architecture. It avoids the one-size-fits-all process tar pit with advice on how to tune your design effort based on the risks you face.

It democratizes architecture. This book seeks to make architecture relevant to all software developers. Developers need to understand how to use constraints as guiderails that ensure desired outcomes, and how seemingly small changes can affect a system's properties.

It cultivates declarative knowledge. There is a difference between being able to hit a ball and knowing why you are able to hit it, what psychologists refer to as procedural knowledge versus declarative knowledge. This book will make you more aware of what you have been doing and provide names for the concepts.

It emphasizes the engineering. This book focuses on the technical parts of software development and what developers do to ensure the system works not job titles or processes. It shows you how to build models and analyze architectures so that you can make principled design tradeoffs. It describes the techniques software designers use to reason about medium to large sized problems and points out where you can learn specialized techniques in more detail.

It provides practical advice. Software design decisions influence the architecture and vice versa. The approach in this book embraces drill-down/pop-up behavior by describing models that have various levels of abstraction, from architecture to data structure design.

George Fairbanks在卡內基•梅隆大學獲得軟件工程專業博士學位，現任Rhino Research公司董事長。Rhino Research是一傢專門提供軟件開發培訓及谘詢的公司，總部設在美國科羅拉多州博爾德市。Georg還是軟件體係結構工作會議WISCA（Working International Conference on Software Architecture）、國際軟件維護大 會ICSM（International Conference on Software Maintenance）以及歐洲軟件架構會議的委員會成員。他還是IEEE軟件工程匯刊和IEEE軟件的仲裁委員。

.

張逸是ThoughtWorks高級谘詢師，程 序員。InfoQ中文站編輯。著譯作包括《軟件設計精要與模式》《WCF服務編程》《Java設計模式》以及評注版《重構：改善既有代碼的設計》。目前居住於成都。

.

倪健是eBaoTech應用架構師，程序員。著作包括《簡單之美：軟件開發實踐者的思考》《IT項目管理那些事兒》（與人閤著）。目前居住於上海。