Books for Great Software Architects — Integration Path

In the Overview, we have seen the high-level roadmap and in Part 1, we went through the Fundamentals Path that covered the first steps into the software architecture which is also considered as a pre-requisite for the specialized parts, 2, 3 and 4.

By completing Part 1, you will be ready to get specialized in one of the architectural domains. In this part, we will draw the reading path for Great Integration Architects.

Integration Architecture Path

Integration Architecture path focuses on the messaging, SOAP-based Webservices design, Web APIs design as well as REST API design.

Book 1: Enterprise Integration Patterns, by Hohpe

This book is a must for every integration architect and it should be your first book as well before moving forward in your reading journey. It is impressively comprehensive book with about 55 patterns and with many examples showing when and how to use the different patterns.

Book 2: Web Service Contract Design & Versioning, by Erl

Although the RESTful webservices are dominating nowadays, but it is still common to see and implement SOAP-based webservices especially in the financial and banking systems. For those who are still working on SOAP-based webservices, this book is a must for you. It is a comprehensive guide to design, version and govern SOAP-based webservices contracts.

Although the title is directed specifically to SOA, but it is still useful and valuable for non-SOA integrations.

Book 3: Designing Web APIs, by Jin

This book is focusing on the Web APIs, listing the different APIs paradigms (RPC, REST, GraphQL, Event-Driven), and it is also defining how to choose the right paradigm. This book is also providing a set of best practices that need to be followed while implemented and documenting a Web API.

To learn more about the different types of APIs and APIs history, please read the following article “API Definition and API History”.

The consolidated list of Web API design rules discussed in the above books are covered in the following article “Consolidated Design Rules and Standards for Great Web API”

Book 4: RESTful Web APIs, by Richardson

This book is building on the previous one by focusing on designing RESTful APIs. The book is focusing on the best practices, especially the usage for hypermedia which is absolutely good, but the thing that I didn’t like about this book was the trying to take the hypermedia into a more dynamic level which is over-complicating the implementation on both the service provider and consumer.

It is good if you can empower what you have read in this book with another two related books:

• REST API Design Rulebook which provides a set of rules that enables you to build consistent webservices interfaces. In this book there are parts talking about something called WRML which is something invented by the author and has no practical implementation, so whenever you see WRML, just skip it.
• RESTful web services cookbook: this book provides more than 100 recipes that address complex scenarios and provide you with the best designing options.

The consolidated list of REST API design rules discussed in the above books are covered in the following article “Consolidated Design Rules and Standards for Great REST API”

Bonus Reading

It will be good to read more about event-driven architectures and for that purpose, I would recommend a book called “Building Event-Driven Microservices, by Adam”

Summary

In this part, we have built on Part 1 and provided a specialized reading path for integration architectures.

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