Beautiful Architecture

Beautiful Architecture is the first book I read of the "Theory in Practice" O'Reilly series. And it's also the most boring, incoherent and useless technical book I've ever read. The chapters, written by different authors, cover the most disparate topics: from operating system to compiler design, from virtualization to web applications, from Gnu Emacs architecture to object oriented programming.

All of that, without any clear direction (architecture?): a few chapters reminded me of some of the more abstruse and theoretical academic papers (see f.i "What is Architecture?" and "Object Oriented Versus Functional"), some others go into the low details that honestly I wouldn't expect in an architecture book. I'd save just a few chapters: "Data Grows up: The Architecture of the Facebook Platform" and the first part of "When the Bazaar sets out to build Cathedrals" (about KDE history). Probably just 30 out of 400 pages, obviously not enough to recommend this book.