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Reviewer: Murat M. Tanik

Pree's book is on the technical side, with major potential practical implications. This is not the kind of book that one expects to read and master in a few hours. It requires careful study and experimentation. Readers who invest the necessary time to study the concepts introduced will certainly benefit from the potential payback in the form of well-designed and reusable object-oriented designs and programs. Ted Lewis states in the foreword that “This enterprising author takes the reader on a forcefully convincing tour of the intricacies of object-oriented design. And he backs up his recommendations with detailed C++ code.” Furthermore, the book provides a deep conceptual survey of “object-oriented design pattern” approaches including Coad's object-oriented patterns, Coplien's coding patterns, Apple et al.'s framework cookbooks, Helm et al.'s formal contracts, and Gammaet et al.'s design pattern catalog. All these approaches are properly referenced. The fundamental point of the book is to look for metalevel patterns in the known and practiced frameworks. The term “framework” is used for an incomplete but generic software architecture that can be modified into solutions in specific domains by applying object-oriented programming concepts. The author introduces the term “metapattern” for “a set of design patterns that describes how to construct frameworks independent of a specific domain.” Continuing along the same line of reasoning, these meta p atterns can be used “to categorize and describe any framework example design pattern on a metalevel.” The book is organized into six chapters and three appendices. The first chapter is about ten pages long and relates object-oriented programming to software quality. The second chapter, in more than 40 pages, reviews the concepts of object-oriented software development, including reusability. A survey of design pattern approaches is presented in chapter 3, covering about 40 pages. Chapters 4 and 5 are more than 100 pages long; they cover the concepts of metapatterns, and give examples and sample applications. Chapter 6 briefly introduces a vision and implications for software development. Appendix A lists the source files for the example presented in chapter 5 (the classes adapting ET++ to a hypertext system application), and Appendix C outlines the procedure to obtain electronic versions of the source files. This book is for studying and experimenting with object frameworks, not for learning object-oriented programming or design. As the author says, “have fun experimenting with this sample application and the application framework ET++.”