August 2009

One of my favorite authors who write in German is Franz Kafka. so I read what is his most characteristic book: Der Proceß. Reading in German is a lot slower than reading in English so it kept me busy during my travels to the Netherlands and Germany a few weeks ago.

It's a beautiful, disturbing book about a trial. It makes you realize that bureaucracy could always be worse -- it could be like Kafka's.

It was a beautiful book to read, and I was very interested to see how it would end. The strange order of the chapters in the end threw me off -- I never read reviews of books before I read them so I didn't know that the book was left not quite finished by the author, even though the final chapter was written.

I've read Das Schloss in the past and just recently I read Die Verwandlung. The next Kafka on my list is Amerika, or perhaps I'll read some of his short stories first.

Enterprise Integration Patterns is part of the same series as Patterns of Enterprise Architecture, a book I didn't care much for 6 years ago because it was stating the obvious too often. The EIP book is from 2004 and is somewhat better, although at times it suffers from the same weakness.

I used it to look up good definitions of components I wanted to use in our product. The definitions of Message Bus and Message Router were particularly helpful. Not immediately helpful in deciding about implementation elements, but good for documenting and communication the design we had in mind.

At the other hand, the descriptions are superficial, and don't offer much insight. This is the same beef I had with "Enterprise Application Patterns" -- the content is too obvious.