[abcde777666]

A lot of these types of books and posts only deal with the low hanging fruits of software design difficulty, such as the provided discount service example.

The trouble is that kind of thing's pretty much software development common sense - only the inexperienced don't know it.

The true difficulties of software development are often must gnarlier in my experience.

For instance, making architectural choices for large and dynamic software systems, such as say a cutting edge game engine - that can be really hard to get right, and there's not always a lot of sage advice out there for how to navigate it - and not just for game engines but for any equally or more complex software.

I guess my point being - I'd love to see more effort into addressing the hard design stuff, and less repetition of what's already been established.

[AndyMcConachie]

Every example I see in programming books that say something like, "You should do it this way." Always come with the caveat of, "It depends."

For the hard stuff that you would like to see covered the "It depends" part becomes more important. The correct way of handling the really tough cases you're talking about are extremely circumstancial. Thus, a book discussing them generally wouldn't really work. What would probably work better are examples of these tough design issues that include the actual code and some discussion about why specific design decisions were made.

I like reading code from people who had to make tough trade offs in the real world and hearing in their own words why they made the decisions they did. I loved reading Lion's Commentary on the UNIX OS 6th edition, for example.

[f1shy]

I’m with you with 99% of those books. But this one is little bit different, IMHO