When I purchased this book almost 3 weeks ago, I was surprised to find that it had been on the shelves for 3 months already. Books that unify advanced architectural concepts such as Domain-Driven Design and design patterns are few and far between. This is especially true in the .NET world since many of the source materials originated in the Java realm.

Nilsson does a rather unique job of puling together some of the best domain-driven, object-oriented patterns and approaches and explain them using .NET-specific examples. The pros and cons, as I see them, are taken from my Amazon.com review and reprinted below:

Pros

• Combines the ideas of Domain Driven Design (Evans) with Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Fowler). These books are pretty much mandatory reading prior to diving into this book.
• Draws upon a myriad of other well-known sources, including materials from Refactoring to Patterns and the GoF, work from Johnson and Lowy, as well as a rare reference to Naked Objects. The more experienced and better read you are, the more this stuff will make sense.
• Rare .NET coverage of advanced concepts like Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs), persistence ignorant (PI) objects, O/R mapping with NHibernate, Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control, and Aspect-Oriented Programming.

Cons

• While some sections are really insightful and could contain more interesting materials, other sections seem to drone on too long. The work on defining the NUnit tests, in particular, flows like a stream of consciousness and doesn’t really add a lot of structured value to understanding DDD, patters, or TDD for that matter.
• Embedded comments in the text adopt from the style used in Framework Design Guidelines. It worked very well for Cwalina / Abrams in their book because it seemed planned in from the outset. Comments like “one reviewer commented on the code with the following, more succinct version” seem like editorial comments left in and not collaborative authoring by design.