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在卡内基•梅隆大学获得软件工程专业博士学位，现任Rhino Research公司董事长。Rhino Research是一家专门提供软件开发培训及咨询的公司，总部设在美国科罗拉多州博尔德市。Georg还是软件体系结构工作会议WISCA（Working International Conference on Software Architecture）、国际软件维护大 会ICSM（International Conference on Software Maintenance）以及欧洲软件架构会议的委员会成员。他还是IEEE软件工程汇刊和IEEE软件的仲裁委员。

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张逸是ThoughtWorks高级咨询师，程 序员。InfoQ中文站编辑。著译作包括《软件设计精要与模式》《WCF服务编程》《Java设计模式》以及评注版《重构：改善既有代码的设计》。目前居住于成都。

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倪健是eBaoTech应用架构师，程序员。著作包括《简单之美：软件开发实践者的思考》《IT项目管理那些事儿》（与人合著）。目前居住于上海。