Books by Neal Ford

There are no easy decisions in software architecture. Instead, there are many hard parts--difficult problems or issues with no best practices--that force you to choose among various compromises. With this book, you'll learn how to think critically about the trade-offs involved with distributed architectures.Architecture veterans and practicing consultants Neal Ford, Mark Richards, Pramod Sadalage, and Zhamak Dehghani discuss strategies for choosing an appropriate architecture. By interweaving a story about a fictional group of technology professionals--the Sysops Squad--they examine everything from how to determine service granularity, manage workflows and orchestration, manage and decouple contracts, and manage distributed transactions to how to optimize operational characteristics, such as scalability, elasticity, and performance.By focusing on commonly asked questions, this book provides techniques to help you discover and weigh the trade-offs as you confront the issues you face as an architect.Analyze trade-offs and effectively document your decisionsMake better decisions regarding service granularityUnderstand the complexities of breaking apart monolithic applicationsManage and decouple contracts between servicesHandle data in a highly distributed architectureLearn patterns to manage workflow and transactions when breaking apart applications

The software development ecosystem is constantly changing, providing a constant stream of new tools, frameworks, techniques, and paradigms. Over the past few years, incremental developments in core engineering practices for software development have created the foundations for rethinking how architecture changes over time, along with ways to protect important architectural characteristics as it evolves. This practical guide ties those parts together with a new way to think about architecture and time.

Suitable for those who develops software for a living, this title offers advice on the mechanics of productivity and also details practices that helps you elude common traps and improve your code. It enables you learn to write the test before you write the code; and manage the lifecycle of your objects fastidiously.

If youre familiar with functional programming basics and want to gain a much deeper understanding, this in-depth guide takes you beyond syntax and demonstrates how you need to think in a new way. Software architect Neal Ford shows intermediate to advanced developers how functional coding allows you to step back a level of abstraction so you can see your programming problem with greater clarity.Each chapter shows you various examples of functional thinking, using numerous code examples from Java 8 and other JVM languages that include functional capabilities. This book may bend your mind, but youll come away with a much better grasp of functional programming concepts.Understand why many imperative languages are adding functional capabilitiesCompare functional and imperative solutions to common problemsExamine ways to cede control of routine chores to the runtimeLearn how memoization and laziness eliminate hand-crafted solutionsExplore functional approaches to design patterns and code reuseView real-world examples of functional thinking with Java 8, and in functional architectures and web frameworksLearn the pros and cons of living in a paradigmatically richer worldIf youre new to functional programming, check out Josh Backfields book Becoming Functional.