Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans

From the jacket text:

"The software development community widely acknowledges that domain modeling is central to software design. Through domain models, software developers are able to express rich functionaltiy and translate it into a software implementation that truly serves the needs of its users. But despite its obvious importance, there are few practical resources that explain how to incorporate effective domain modeling into the software development process.

Domain-Driven Design fills that need. This is not a book about specific technologies. It offers readers a systematic approach to learn domain-driven design, presenting an extensive set of design best practices, experience-based techniques, and fundamental principles that facilitate the development of software projects facing complex domains. Intertwining design and development practice, thsi book incorporates numerous examples based on actual projects to illustrate the application of domain-driven design to real-world software development.

Readers learn how to use a domain model to make a complex development effort more focused and dynamic. A core of best practices and standard patterns provides a commo language for the development team. A shift in emphasis -- refactoring not just the code but the model underlying the code -- in combinatin with the frequent iterations of Agile development lead to deeper insight into domains and enhanced communication between domain expert and programmer. Domain-Driven Design then builds on this foundation, and addresses modeling and design for complex systems and larger organizations.

Specific topics covered include:

- Getting all team members to speak the same language

- Connecting model and implementation more deeply

- Sharpening key distinctions in a model

- Managing the lifecycle of a domain object

- Writing domain code that is safe to combine in elaborate ways

- Making complex code obvious and predicatble

- Formulating a domain vision statement

- Distilling the core of a complex domain

- Digging out implicit concepts needed in the model

- Applying analysis patterns

- Relating design patterns to the model

- Maintaining model integrity in a large system

- Dealing with coexisting models on the same project

- Organizing systems with large-scale structures

- Recognizing and responding to modeling breakthroughs

With this book in hand, object-oriented developers, system analysts, and designers will have the guidance they need to organize and focus their work, create rich and useful domain models, and leverage those models into quality, long-lasting software implementations."

Review

First of all, a MUST READ. Even if you don't want to or can't use DDD on your projects I think it helps a lot to improve your modeling skills. I read the book in 2007 and it was THE book that year.

Evans takes you on a journey from the smallest modeling parts (entities, value objects, ...) to the big ones (Evolving order, Responsibility layer, …) and to use best practices/patterns to distill your core model and gain deeper insights. The chapters start with a mind map about the concepts and their relations, then you will be guided step by step to understand these concepts and how they connect to each other.

Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu

From the jacket text:

"In Modern C++ Design, Andrei Alexandrescu opens new vistas for C++ programmers. Displaying extraordinary creativity and programming virtuosity, Alexandrescu offers a cutting -edge approach to design that unites design patterns, generic programming, and C++, enabling programmers to achieve expressive, flexible, and highly reusable code.

This book introduces the concept of generic components -- reusable design templates that produce boilerplate code for compiler consumption -- all within C++. Generic components enable an easier and more seamless transition from design to application code, generate code that better expresses the original design intention, and support the reuse of design structures with minimal recoding.

The author describes the specific C++ techniques and features that are used in building generic components and goes on to implement industrial strenght generic components for real-world applications. Recurring issues that C++ developers face in their day-to-day activity are discussed in depth and implemented in a generic way. These include:

- Policy-based design for flexibility

- Partial template specialization

- Typelist-powerful type manipulation structures

- Patterns such as Visitor, Singleton, Command, and Factories

- Multi-method engines

For each generic component, the book presents the fundamental problems and design options, and finally implements a generic solution.

In addition, an accompanying Web site, www.awprofessional.com/titles/0-201-70431-5, makes the code implementations available for the generic components in the book and provides a free, downloadable C++ library, called Loki, created by the author. Loki provides out-of-the-box functionality for virtually any C++ project."

Review

Scott Meyers recommended this book at one of his seminars, so I decided to take a closer look. This was the beginning of my journey into detailed development with C++ templates. Even if you are not that familiar with C++ templates the stuff in the book is really understandable.

In the long run it helped me to save some time and code by just having a set of basic design patterns implemented as C++ templates. Highly recommended if you are new to C++ templates, if you have already read one of my other recommended C++ template books you might find the implemented design patterns useful.