Rating: 
Summary: This is a must have book.
Review: I first became acquainted with the works of Martin Fowler back in 1999, when I read Analysis Patterns. It was a fantastic book. I then read Refactoring, UML Distilled and when I saw 2 months ago that he had written a book on J2EE Architecture, I couldn't wait for the release. I just received my copy the other day and I wasn't disappointed. I picked it up and started reading. I wish that I had had this book about 2 years when I began writing Servlets, JSPs and EJBs. It would have saved me a lot of headaches and failures and learning the hard way. He writes in a very clear, concise manner that is easily understandable. He also provides a lot of code samples. I have one problem with Martin Fowler though, I want him to write more books.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding work in the field
Review: I normally don't bother to write reviews, but some of the shallow ones I found here irritated me enough to write. I have been a developer, architect, and development manager. My latest project was a 100+ developer year enterprise application. Fowler clearly knows the field, he speaks with confidence of development experiences with projects that went live. I have no idea of what a newbie to enterprise application development would gain from this book. The DTO pattern, for example, is profoundly powerful and his representation of it is accurate, but he presents it in a casual, low-key way, and its significance might well escape the uninitiated. When you talk to programmers who only know the one thing they worked on you hear a naive, blind conviction in their voice, but when you read Fowler, you hear the weary lessons of hundreds of developers on dozens of large projects. If you are experienced, read chapter 8 first, then the patterns, then 1 - 7 if need be. If you are new, read chapter 8 first, then the patterns, then CODE the patterns a dozen times, then read the rest of the book. Fowler says you should read 1-8 then the patterns as needed, but I say the 8 pages of chapter 8 roll up the first seven chapters very nicely, and then please read all the patterns in associative order from your point of view.
Rating: 
Summary: A good summary of other works, but little new material
Review: I read this the first week it came out and was suprised by how much it rehashed GOF and the Core J2EE patterns books; however I have referred back to it on "Unit of Work" and a couple other concepts that it helped to differentiate. TO it's credit it consolidated information from several bodies of knowledge in patterns, and it provided c# examples in many cases, thereby being the first high profile work that really exposed MS developers to a world of patterns, that was arguably previously unknown. Besides being somewhat lacking in originality, the other problems were the fact it actually catalogued anti-patterns as patterns (e.g. transaction script is basically unmaintainable web pages), and it addressed enterprise system architecture without paying any mind to integration concerns (see Hohpe for an excellent treatment of this subject); I'm not sure the two really are separable when we start talking about business services. The best thing about this book is that it emphasizes the criticality of rich domain models in complex systems, which IMHO is a core design principle which is currently being eroded by a current of irrational and marketing-drunk SOA furor ... which reminds me, Domain Driven Design is not to be missed, it's simply an inspired work which helps to make Fowler's domain model achievable for almost anyone.
Rating:
Summary: A dissenting comment
Review: I'm a little surprised by the number of rave reviews about this book. The book is ok, but there are some annoying problems that let it down. For starters, the lack of decent proofreading before going to print ' it's an expensive reference book and I would expect better quality. Secondly the colloquial vernacular only impedes, not complements the reading. Thirdly, the patterns seemed fewer than I expected and covering only elementary issues. I suppose the audience is primarily for enterprise architecture novices.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice Discussions on Software Architecture
Review: I've enjoyed reading Martin Fowler other books. I've enjoyed this one as well. I did have a hard time reading this book at first because of the organization of the book. The book starts with discussions about patterns and their trade-offs. I was familiar with the architectures presented, but I was not familiar with the pattern nomenclature that was being used. I was easily thrown off track because of that. Luckily, Martin Fowler's web site ... has a nice catalog of the patters with short summaries that helped me understand the definition of the pattern name. After spending 1/2 an hour on his site, that the discussions were easily understandable and enlightening.With that said, I'm disappointed at the structure of this book. I would expect the definitions of the patterns to appear up front, and the discussions to appear after the pattern definitions.
Rating:
Summary: Everything Martin Fowler writes is 5 stars
Review: If you've read Refactoring or UML Distilled, or Planning XP, you won't be disappointed with this Fowler book. He's the clearest writer and thinker in the Agile/XP/Patterns group of authors. The book is particularly strong in describing how to map between a persistent relational database and an in-memory object representation of business logic. Fowler distills the various approaches to their essence, clearly presents the tradeoffs and defines an intuitive vocabulary to make it easier for development teams to discuss how the patterns apply to their unique application. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Everything Martin Fowler writes is 5 stars
Review: If you've read Refactoring or UML Distilled, or Planning XP, you won't be disappointed with this Fowler book. He's the clearest writer and thinker in the Agile/XP/Patterns group of authors. The book is particularly strong in describing how to map between a persistent relational database and an in-memory object representation of business logic. Fowler distills the various approaches to their essence, clearly presents the tradeoffs and defines an intuitive vocabulary to make it easier for development teams to discuss how the patterns apply to their unique application. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Go ahead.. add another to your Fowler collection
Review: Martin Fowler does it again. He manages to capture complexities of enterprise class application development in a simple, easy to read book. If you've read any of Fowler's other titles, the structure of this one will come as no surprise. The first have of the book discusses the patterns in "narrative" format, and the second half presents them in reference format. If you are new to this subject, I highly recommend reading through the narrative section to understand how the patterns fit together. If you've been involved in enterprise application development before, chances are you can simply flip to the second half of the book and start skimming the patterns. Each is only a handful of pages long and is accompanied by a description, use cases and example code. Like other "patterns" titles, if you've been doing software development for a while you'll read the patterns and think "oh.. of course, I did that in xyz project". The patterns themselves may not be groundbreaking and chances are you've seen them in some form, but having a well documented reference of them nearby will be an asset to any software development effort.
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Summary: A Collection of Patterns for Modestly Large Systems
Review: Martin Fowler is a brand name for lucid ("UML distilled"), maturity enhancing ("Refactoring" for the practical side and the great "Analysis Patterns" for the modeling side) top notch books for software professionals. This book even has on its front cover a label telling us it is a "Martin Fowler Signature Book". This book was a disappointment. In the introduction Fowler claims much less. This book should be merely "useful". It is much better than that. It is good. So what is the problem? The title is misleading. It is about patterns, but not really about enterprise applications. I am not in the subject of enterprise applications. I never ever have touched a program like SAP or a language like COBOL. But I encountered nearly every problem addressed in the patterns. Even the money class has corresponding problems in other fields: a Voltage has both a value and a unit. Also having complaints about the fact that 3 times 33% are less than 100% are always common. What is this book about? It is basically about problems you have in moderately big applications. How do you connect a relational database with its structure and transactionality to a system, especially an object-oriented system (but not only)? And how do you connect to the user interface, especially a web interface. Also it contains a lot of useful small patterns at the end. As you can see: a lot of valuable stuff for many people. Yes and you get the deep judgments and fine humor of Martin Fowler too. What is the main problem? This book is not really suited for actual reading. It contains an introductory part of a hundred and a reference part of four hundred pages. The introduction part is annoying to read. It is at the same time too simple (Some knowledge of relational databases should be a requirement for this book, and much more...) and too difficult (An extremely lot of forward references to patterns described later in this book). Also a lot of stuff is in the most trivial sense repeated within a few pages distance only. And it is repeated down to the wording of the individual sentences. The reference part is a lot better. It gets better to read the further along you already read. The number of forward references gets less along the way. I liked especially the last part about base patterns. As their name already says they should have been much more to the beginning of the book. This book contains an excellent book within it, just waiting to be "refactored" out of this collection of valuable thoughts. I firmly believe that Martin Fowler is well suited to do this refactoring job. I do sincerely hope that he does it for the next edition of the book. Most of the work is already invested and the result would be very valuable for many people. It is possible to write excellent and readable books about patterns as for example Buschmann et al in "Pattern Oriented Software Architecture" showed.
Rating:
Summary: This book is ok, but...
Review: Martin Fowler is a great speaker and presenter. I felt this book felt short of his image and wasn't all that good. If Martin were not the author of this book, I suspect that it would not have sold any copies.
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