Software Product Lines : Practices and Patterns

Rating:
Summary: Great topic, but fairly academic
Review: Book compiled from numerous interviews as opposed to real practitioners. I've worked with product lines and was quite excited when this book was published. However, I was rather disappointed. It doesn't really provide the insight into how do I sit down and create a product line.

The first chapter is a great introduction to product lines. The next couple of chapters are okay, but rather fluffy. The rest of the book is really academic and formal and I didn't find it particularly useful. These chapters were also very difficult to read (tedious and dry). Too much pontification; too little real information.

Rating:
Summary: Great book if you already know Software Product Lines, but..
Review: If you have the concept of software product lines down, this is a great book, but if not you can easily get lost or confused, so it becomes difficult reading. If you want to explore software product lines, buy this book, then while you are waiting for the book to arrive read the website http://www.softwareproductlines.com to get up to speed on the concepts.

Software product lines will become a must whether you develop enterprise software or embedded software. This is so much more than we ever discussed about software resue.....

Rating:
Summary: If you're already doing this, a great book; otherwise, not
Review: So, if you've already made the decision to go with software product lines, this is an excellent book. It's got a huge amount of reference material, is well-edited, and clearly has the benefit of a lot of practical experience.

Unfortunately, if you're debating with or just want to learn about software product lines, this book isn't for you. I didn't see a single example of when software product lines are *not* appropriate for a set of work that needs to be done and, in general, this just assumes that you already have the sort of work that fits this model and dives right into the details. Also, the "29 practices" are spread over just under 300 pages, and make it hard to understand the big picture. It would've been nice to see even one-page descriptions of the patterns in context to be able to pull it all together more easily.