ISBN:0201895420Amazon.com
Patterns are higher-order designs that can be reused across projects and types of computer systems. Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models defines over 70 patterns, beginning with some from the business world, such as the Party and Accountability patterns, which define the players in organizations and whom they report to. Many of the other patterns are drawn from the health care industry and mainly show patterns of doctor-patient interactions.
The patterns for financial markets will probably be accessible for the majority of readers. Author Martin Fowler defines a Transaction pattern (and related patterns) as well as several patterns for the Accounting of Objects. He moves on to modeling stock markets with Portfolio, Quote, and Scenario patterns, which define how a price for a stock is determined for a given moment. Interestingly, he establishes patterns for Forward Contracts (for derivatives) as well as Options, and so takes on a complicated area in today's financial markets.
Fowler's considerable design experience in these fields is beneficial, as he is able to define each pattern in both text and software engineering diagrams. Only rarely does the author provide implementations of these designs and those that are furnished are done in Smalltalk, which makes this book more suitable for those who have experience in object design./p>
Reviews From AMAZON.COM
The only "practical" book on deciding which design to use
What I am nearly always missing when reading about design (esp. when sifting through design case studies) is the path that lead to a design. The weighing of arguments that made the author/designer choose the solution at hand. The context and the "drivers". Fowler is the only one achieving this: offering different solutions and discussing their advantages and disadvanteges. Yes he dives deep and goes into abstract concepts, but sometimes solutions only differ from an abstract viewpoint. You need quite some understanding of design principles, to (i) understand the book and (ii) be a good designer.
For me this is the book that helped me understand the design process as it should be. And using "analysis patterns" he gives plentiful of concrete examples, sharpening your mind.
One remark to everyone critcizing Fowler for not using UML: This book does not use UML since it dates back to 1996! When UML was not really there. Version 0.9 of the UML came out in the second half of 1996. And btw. Martin Fowler has written the very first -- and still one of the best -- book on UML ("UML Distilled", now in its 3rd edition).
Truly Unique, Extremely Valuable Entry
Kind of funny, reading the reviews here makes it clear that this book is something of a sleeper, it has not gotten the exposure that a lot of the other pillars of the pattern community have. I think the reason is that people may glance at it and think that it is too domain-specific. In fact, this book does a lot of great things, it is a meditation on some crucial OO modeling issues.
The first problem Fowler broaches is a patient's weight and he states, correctly I'm sure, that most programmers would just make weight a class property and make it be of type integer. But there are problems with that approach. First one is the issue of units. If you make it an int you are assuming that it is just a count of pounds. What happens if you want another measure? Furthermore, what happens when someone asks where the patient's weight has gone in the last month.
From this point of departure, many issues are taken up. For people who have grappled with OLAP before and know something about dimensional models, it will seem as though he is trying to make an operational into an analytical model, which experience has taught us is not good. But, in fact, there is sanity to Fowler's approach.
Personally, if he ever does rev this book (read on his site that he is thinking about it), I wish he would consider writing a section that attempts to hide the observation elements and seamlessly map them back into the object model. Having a separate class keeping track of what the weight of a person represented by another class is does ultimately seem to undo the objectness of the model, but that's a minor nit. Definitely a book that I've returned to many times.