Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book on patterns
Review: This book is a perfect companion to "Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" (the GoF book) and it is more didactical than the later.If you are new to patterns, I suggest that you first read this book and refer to "Design Patterns" when needed. In "Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture", there are some chapters on pattern and software architecture concepts, but most of the book is dedicated to describing architectural and design patterns (there are a few pages on idioms). Some of the architectural patterns are well known: layers, pipes, filters, broker and microkernel. The code is clear and written mainly in C++. The notations used are easy to understand (OMT notation is addopted for the object models and an adaptation of Message Sequence Charts to object interations). The production (cover, paper, etc) is excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book on patterns
Review: This book is a perfect companion to "Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" (the GoF book) and it is more didactical than the later. If you are new to patterns, I suggest that you first read this book and refer to "Design Patterns" when needed. In "Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture", there are some chapters on pattern and software architecture concepts, but most of the book is dedicated to describing architectural and design patterns (there are a few pages on idioms). Some of the architectural patterns are well known: layers, pipes, filters, broker and microkernel. The code is clear and written mainly in C++. The notations used are easy to understand (OMT notation is addopted for the object models and an adaptation of Message Sequence Charts to object interations). The production (cover, paper, etc) is excellent.
Rating:
Summary: This book rocks!
Review: This book is ten times better than GoF or Fowler's book. I would love to see another volume in this series covering Web Services and Integration patterns, maybe written by Ambler, Naggapan, and Cooper would be excellent. Check out Eric Newcomer's book on Web Services as a great companion.
Rating: 
Summary: Clear and wide-ranging
Review: This is an unusual book in the pattern genre. It presents a number of patterns, categorized by archtiectural level. That's just the first part of the book, though. The third of the book is about the process of using, relating, collecting, and distributing patterns. Only chapter 2 really addresses patterns for the strategic, architectural level of a software system. It does a very adequate job, using a variety of notations, examples, and analysis steps. This book is from 1996, so time has changed our view of some patterns. "Reflection," for example, has become pervasive in applications based on plugins and software components. It is also a fundamental API in the major langauges (Java and C#) released since this book was published - perhaps reflection should be downgraded to an "idiom". That's just nitpicking, though, since reflection is even more important now than when the book was written. For contrast, the authors present additional design patterns (including some from Gamma's book) for use at tactical design levels. They also discuss idioms patterns that typically involve just a few lines of code within on function. The contrast between the three different levels of implementation and design gives a useful discussion. The authors also present a weak chapter on "systems" or "langauges" of patterns The discussion is OK as far as it goes. The weakness is in what it omits. After reading this brief chapter, the programmer has very little practical information about choosing patterns from some library for some task. The poor programmer has no information at all about how to link patterns together, and that's a real stumbling block for beginning pattern users. The final section of the book is really sociology. It's about the pattern community, what that community is for, and how to be a working member. I find the discussion un-helpful, but I expect opinions to differ. Even today, this is a good second book (after Gamma's 'Design Patterns') on patterns and pattern usage. It lack the depth and precision of Gamma's book, and tends to add words without adding meaning. On the positive side, it's broader than Gamma's, and addresses a wider range of implementation levels.
Rating:
Summary: This is *the* Patterns Book
Review: While I have argued since it came out that the G of 4 book is the most important programming book of the decade, I have to agree with the other, lone reviewer here, that this is a deeper, more mature work. I rediscovered this book when Alan Holub's series of recent articles began to appear in JavaWorld about implemnting UIs and I realized that he was taking a lot of his ideas from Buschman. One of the reasons I bring this up is that it made me realize that this is the great thing about this book: it dares to wrestle some of the complex issues and tradeoffs to the ground, presenting the reader with a more useable guide to the practice of implementing patterns. You may have read John Vlissides' (Go4 author) comments about how for years after the publication of his book he'd ask when he spoke who had read the book and nearly everyone would raise their hands, then he'd ask who wanted to come up and explain the momento pattern or the bridge and only a couple of people's hands would be raised. This is in part due to the fact that the Go4 book encourages the concept of simple ICs that can just be retrieved and plugged in. In reality, as anyone who has read Vlissides' other book which spends its whole duration talking just about Visitor, the opposite is true. Buschman's book is the best in this regard at spanning the range of design issues but still dealing with the complexities of implementation, and helping the reader through the process of assessing trade-offs and still matching requirements.
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