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Introduction
The idea for this book was born during one of my project-related trips to the beautiful city of Hangzhou in China, where in the role of Chief Architect I had to guide a team of very young, very smart and extremely dedicated software developers and verification engineers. Soon it became clear that as eager as the team was to jump into the coding, it did not have any experience in system architecture and design and if I did not want to spend all my time in constant travel between San Francisco and Hangzhou, the only option was to groom a number of local junior architects. Logically, one of the first questions being asked by these carefully selected future architects was whether I could recommend a book or other learning material that could speed up the learning cycle. I could not. Of course, there were many books on various related topics, but many of them were too old and most of the updated information was either somewhere on the Internet dispersed between many sites and online magazines, or buried in my brain along with many years of experience of system architecture.
There is no doubt that no book or class can replace experience of system design, but a single and relatively compact information source could still help. This is how the book started. As much as I wanted to create a single comprehensive book, size and time forced me to focus mainly on the technical aspects of the architecture, which are more relevant for junior architects, leaving out the tools, processes ...
