The Architecture of Open Source Applications  (English, Paperback, Brown Amy)

The Architecture of Open Source Applications is a book on Open Source Software Development edited by Amy Brown and Greg Wilson.

Summary of the Book

Programming and carpentry have much in common. Both are exacting crafts, people spend lifetimes improving them, and when they step away, they realize that despite being artistic and beautiful, both aren’t architecturally sound. Architects, those who design buildings and those who design software frameworks, are usually concentrating on making their designs safer and infallible. They spend their lives looking at the designs, searching for loopholes and trying to prevent their creations from exploding in their face. However, while architects study hundreds of thousands of buildings, software architects only ever manage to study a handful of programs, usually the ones they have written themselves. This book tries to change that situation. Each chapter focuses on the architecture of an open source application, explaining how it works, how it communicates within its parts, why it has been built that way and what one can take away from it. The architecture is explained by the people who know these software best, usually those who have worked hands-on with the code, or those who have tested it thoroughly. This book will teach software developers how to write neater programs with a larger, nobler purpose in mind: the promise of a world of free and open source software.

About the Editors

Amy Brown has worked with the software field for ten years. She graduated from the University of Waterloo and is currently based in Toronto.

Greg Wilson is an expert in high-performance scientific computing, data visualization, and computer security. He has also written Beautiful Code, for which he was awarded the 2008 Jolt Award. Dr. Wilson obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1993.