Microservice Patterns - Chris Richardson

GoodReads summary: Microservice Patterns teaches enterprise developers and architects how to build applications with the microservice architecture. Rather than simply advocating for the use the microservice architecture, this clearly-written guide takes a balanced, pragmatic approach. You'll discover that the microservice architecture is not a silver bullet and has both benefits and drawbacks. Along the way, you'll learn a pattern language that will enable you to solve the issues that arise when using the microservice architecture. This book also teaches you how to refactor a monolithic application to a microservice architecture.

I have a rule: The "badness" of a book is directly proportional to the number of "as follows" the author uses in it.

And, oh boy, do they use "as follows" in this book (no, seriously).

The first 1/4 of the book is pretty good, showing patterns and giving explanations about it. The rest of the book is strongly focused on external frameworks and libraries and has almost no patterns discussion at all -- for example, the second 1/4 is, basically, focused on the author's framework -- a Java framework. Also, the author seems strongly focused on Java code, even after explaining that a microservice fleet can be written in lots of different languages -- even listing some languages.

There is a strong preference for Java and Spring on the book, to the point that, when discussing a point, it shows a Spring module with a huge explanation on what it does and another saying, simply, "another Java framework".

The code examples are also bad. It seems the author decided to use IntelliJ as IDE and use its variable-name-generator (based on the class name) to create the variable names. Classes names are really long on Java and, using the IDE, the variables names also get really long, which by itself is not bad, but in a book, it means the code will get formatted like any text and, thus, get completely broken, and really hard to read.

There are lots of images. And, as usual with a lot of images, 90% of them are completely irrelevant, adding absolutely nothing of whatever was described already.

Those failures are extremely upsetting. You're getting a book about patterns and end up with lots of pages of discussion and code -- badly formatted code -- and very little pattern. Instead of explaining each pattern in depth, the author decided to skip the whole thing and just show you how to use some framework that already implements the pattern. That, by itself, isn't bad, but without understanding what the pattern is, and what it is good for, you won't know if it is a good idea to use it or not -- because patterns are ways to describe your solution, not "ready made" solutions.

Honestly, I can't recommend this book for anyone that is starting their way into microservices.