Rating: 
Summary: "In Practice" are the key words
Review: SAIP gave some useful insights into how to apply the most practical aspects of software architecture to projects. Rather than dwelling on the "pie in the sky" theories that are so abundant (but which are usually completely impractical in a company which needs revenue to survive), the authors give good practices to meet both architectural quality, and practical goals. They also give some fairly illustrative examples.What I didn't like about the book was that it doesn't present a complete approach to developing a software architecture. It outlines many different pieces of the puzzle of architecting, but doesn't do a good job of putting the complete puzzle together for the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Emphasis on case studies
Review: The authors examine 7 case studies representing 37% of the 19 chapters. "The software architecture of a program or computing system is the structure(s) of the system, which comprise software components, the externally visible properties of those components, and the relationships among them (pg 23)." Describes common structures for example module structure, conceptual or logical structure, process or coordination structure, physical structure, uses structure, calls structure, data flow, control flow, and class structure. Explains how choosing architecture influences the achievement of quality attributes. Illustrates architectural styles such as batch sequential, pipes & filters, event systems, repository, virtual machine, and object oriented.
Rating:
Summary: Close, but no UML
Review: The book is basically good. SAAM is useful. However, I am at a loss to understand why the authors have chosen to totally ignore UML, which is (and was at the time of publication) the de facto standard for representing software architecture. They have instead represented architectures in their own non-standard, which the reader is forced to learn to understand their diagrams. UML is now as fundamental a piece of knowledge to the software architect as schematics are to the electrical engineer, and for the same reason - it is a common language of discourse, and is supported by the available tools. I urge the authors to publish a second edition with UML substituted for the ad-hoc diagrams.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting and informative reading
Review: The book is well written and quite comprehensive on the subjects covered. It provides an extensive coverage of topics around software architecture and explains the relationship between software architecture, architectural styles, systems, etc. It also includes a substantial number of novel discussions on issues such as architectural qualities, architecture-based system development, and architecture-based reuse. It uses extended examples to illustrate the points being made. The only thing I didn't like was the lack of a more formal approach to presenting the subject matters.
Rating:
Summary: Soon to appear in an undergraduate software course...
Review: The second edition of the book makes a good journeyman's guidebook, which the first edition didn't since software architecture was still a mystique. The second edition, which has been heavily revamped, makes it clear that software architecture is a mature discipline. I used the first edition, along with SEI technical papers in a graduate-level software architecture introductory course. After reading the first edition, I still wasn't sure what a software architect should do. The second edition makes it clear. I think a lot of the technical papers that I read are now chapters in the book. Some new chapters are simply great: Understanding Quality Attributes, Achieving Qualities, Designing the Architecture, Documenting Software Architectures, the ATAM, and the CBAM. I really liked the replacement of ADL with UML, the de facto standard, with all of its warts and blemishes. For criticism, this book was history as soon as it hit the presses. You'd still need to read SEI technical papers to be current. One of the chapters discusses the performance problems with remote entity beans and makes no reference to EJB 2.0 spec local entity beans with no performance hit on every cross-bean call. Likewise, the final chapter on "The Future" wasn't so bold as to prognosticate on OMG's current work on MDA, but they may be alluding to it with "Moving from architecture to code." Still more fun to read than a harlequin romance novel and readable in four days.
Rating:
Summary: Soon to appear in an undergraduate software course...
Review: The second edition of the book makes a good journeyman's guidebook, which the first edition didn't since software architecture was still a mystique. The second edition, which has been heavily revamped, makes it clear that software architecture is a mature discipline. I used the first edition, along with SEI technical papers in a graduate-level software architecture introductory course. After reading the first edition, I still wasn't sure what a software architect should do. The second edition makes it clear. I think a lot of the technical papers that I read are now chapters in the book. Some new chapters are simply great: Understanding Quality Attributes, Achieving Qualities, Designing the Architecture, Documenting Software Architectures, the ATAM, and the CBAM. I really liked the replacement of ADL with UML, the de facto standard, with all of its warts and blemishes. For criticism, this book was history as soon as it hit the presses. You'd still need to read SEI technical papers to be current. One of the chapters discusses the performance problems with remote entity beans and makes no reference to EJB 2.0 spec local entity beans with no performance hit on every cross-bean call. Likewise, the final chapter on "The Future" wasn't so bold as to prognosticate on OMG's current work on MDA, but they may be alluding to it with "Moving from architecture to code." Still more fun to read than a harlequin romance novel and readable in four days.
Rating:
Summary: High density, abstract and excellent book
Review: This book has only a few hundred pages. It took me still two months to read through it. Every sentence is loaded with information. A lot of important statements are stuffed into lists and tables. This gives the book excellent reference qualities and this makes the book quite a hard read, especially after work. The content is relevant, clearly described and trustworthy. It has very little references to alternative views on the subject. I am still looking for a good introductory fat book on software architecture.
Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: This book is my bible with regards of software architecture. In previous S.E. courses, I heard about software architecture, but the notion never quite sank on my skull; perhaps because the notion itself required a course on itself, or in this case, a book. A minor problem is that the book does not use UML; however, the diagrams the authors use are easy to understand. More importantly, I find the narrative is as good as the diagrams themselves. I almost never have to look at the diagrams to understand the notions. Tumbs up to the authors!
Rating: 
Summary: too academic to be of practical use
Review: This book is too academical to be of any practical use.
I have read about 60% of the book and I could not find anything that I could actually use.
This is the problem with books written by academics or people who have not actually done software development in the past 5 years, or so.
This problem becomes even worse when the authors are working for the Software Engineering Institute - SEI (the guys who believe in methodology above anything else).
This is book is filled with classifications and very terse or abstract statements.
I would not recommend it to anybody who actually hopes to learn something they can apply at work.
Another recommendation: if you want to read good, down to earth books, avoid those written by people working for SEI.
Rating:
Summary: excellent text-book on software architecture
Review: This book offers a very good overview of this important discipline as well as a sound introduction into state-of-the-art architecture-centered engineering. Good structure, well chosen case studies and a good coverage of all relevant topics. I think this is a must-read for every decent software engineer.
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