Review of '12 essential skills for software architects' on 'GoodReads'
3 stars
I didn't particularly like this book, but I want to start by saying that it's really my own fault. I should have taken a closer look at the synopsis and the table of contents, I basically read it based on the title alone and it wound up being a very different book than what I was expecting.
I was expecting a technical book for architects, or even any engineer doing architectural work and making decisions of an architectural nature. Ultimately the book is entirely nontechnical, and what it tends to view as "architects" I tend to think of more as "managers". The book is mostly about soft skills for management types and yeah, it's not really focused on management skills in terms of managing people or anything, so it's fair in that it's still focused on the skills of individual contributors.
A more accurate title for the book would be …
I didn't particularly like this book, but I want to start by saying that it's really my own fault. I should have taken a closer look at the synopsis and the table of contents, I basically read it based on the title alone and it wound up being a very different book than what I was expecting.
I was expecting a technical book for architects, or even any engineer doing architectural work and making decisions of an architectural nature. Ultimately the book is entirely nontechnical, and what it tends to view as "architects" I tend to think of more as "managers". The book is mostly about soft skills for management types and yeah, it's not really focused on management skills in terms of managing people or anything, so it's fair in that it's still focused on the skills of individual contributors.
A more accurate title for the book would be something like "Ivory Tower Architect Soft Skills: How to Interact With The Rest of the Business When You're The Most Senior Person on the Team and You No Longer Write Code".
If that's up your alley, the book is actually pretty good. Very thorough, well written, covers a lot of ground and is organized and broken up into right-sized chunks. If that's not appealing to you, I'd say give it a pass. Most of it is common sense anyway.