Well, i am not sure what to think of this book. It is a bit uneven as it is a composition of many separate articles written by different authors.

First chapter was really poor. A lot of talk but no real value. How many times do we have to hear that architecture and design are important? Entire chapter is a very vague and buzzword filled blob.

Second chapter was actually very entertaining but again also bringing little value. Author describes two systems he used to work on. He brings a list of factors that made them fail / succeed. I like the chapter as it seemed a bit funny and had some good points.

Third chapter was a disappointment again. It was written very nicely and begins well. Author describes a utopia-like design of a system that against all the odds scales perfectly and does the impossible things. I like the idea and most of the design decisions described. There is a major flaw though. System was never released. It was some side labs project of Sun and Oracle closed it down after taking over. There is community version but i did not see any serious online games written using it. Does it make sense to describe a system as part of beautiful architecture if no one ever successfully put it to the test (and made it big)?

Its like saying "we have this model of perfect system, we synchronize every operation to the disk so it scales perfectly!". Entertaining and interesting but i am not sure if it was worth putting in the book.

The rest of the book is in similar fashion. Some bits are fun, some good some bad but nothing really stands out. The worst thing is that it is a compilation of short articles and there is no deep analysis of any topic i guess.

I would not really recommend this book.

Final score: 6/10