I just got word from the printer that the hardbacks are due to arrive around August 31. That means they’ll be for sale at Amazon maybe a week later.

The printing job is kind of a leap of faith. I did get a proof of the insides and a proof of the cover, separately, but no complete book. And the process for creating the proof is different than for creating the real book, which is printed on an offset press. And what if the cover alignment isn’t right — will the spine text be off-center? Let’s just hope it looks good.

I’ll be delivering the Architecture Haiku presentation, possibly in an expanded form, at the Boulder Java User Group on 7 Sept 2010. The slides for the talk have been posted (thanks to DOSUG and Matthew McCullogh). They are also available as PDF.

Feedback on this talk has been pretty positive. I think this is because people would like to know how to do something helpful with a small amount of time — telling them how to create comprehensive architecture documents isn’t relevant because they don’t have that much time (and/or their projects are not risky enough to justify spending that much time). But writing down nothing is usually a problem too.

This talk suggests writing down about 1 page worth of information on a system, emphasizing ideas that get at the gist of the architecture and why it was chosen.

E-book version (ePub, PDF, & Mobi) available soon for $25.

With the hardback book, I’m trying to keep the price down. It’s hard to tell what Amazon will set as a price, but I’m hoping for around $40 for the hardback book. That’s cheaper than any similar architecture book. (You can safely ignore the list price they have up today — their wholesale price is 55% off list).

The e-book will be cheaper still: just $25. That price will include three e-book formats: ePub, Mobi, and the ubiquitous PDF. That is amazing two ways. First, no one else (that I’m aware of) gives you three formats for the price of one. And second, it beats the pants off of the price of similar books.

I will be speaking about Architecture Haiku, a one-page architecture description, at the Denver Open Source User Group on Tuesday, 3 August 2010.

An Architecture Haiku is a one-page, quick-to-build, uber-terse design description. No project wants “shelfware” documentation, but many must communicate their designs. 20 years of architecture research suggests that tradeoffs, quality attribute priorities, architecture styles, and constraints are short yet valuable.

Edit 9 Aug 2010: Slides from Architecture Haiku talk

Just a reminder that I’ll be speaking about Architecture Haikus at the Northern Colorado Architect’s Group in Fort Collins, Weds 21 July 2010. I don’t yet have details on the venue or time, but I’ll edit this post when I get them.

An Architecture Haiku is a one-page, quick-to-build, uber-terse design description. No project wants “shelfware” documentation, but many must communicate their designs. 20 years of architecture research suggests that tradeoffs, quality attribute priorities, architecture styles, and constraints are short yet valuable.

Edit 9 Aug 2010: Slides from Architecture Haiku talk

WICSA 2011, the 9th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture, will be held in Boulder, Colorado next year, 20-24 June 2011. I have been asked to be on the program committee.

The program committee has released a preliminary call for papers. The paper submission deadline is 7 February 2011, so get your word processor fired up.

The text from the attached PDF follows after the break.

My apologies if small updates like this are boring, but the book copyedits came in today and they’re all trivial. This is good. They’re things like missing periods, a few misspelled words, missing/extra hyphens (ie usage differences), and so on. I should be able to incorporate these into the manuscript today and have it back to the publisher.

I don’t expect that this will hasten publication because they have to schedule time with the printer. But I’d be happy to be wrong!

And I’ve just noticed the book price is down to $40.46 on Amazon. I wonder what their low price guarantee means for pre-orders. In particular, will Nels (the first order) get the new, lower price?

Edit 11 July 2010: Price is now $39.75, set by me. Note the new Amazon page for Just Enough Software Architecture.

The other bit of news is that we’re starting up a software architecture and design group in Boulder. You can sign up and come to our meetings. The first meeting is in about a half our at Sherpa’s restaurant (yum!).

Edit 11 July 2010: Revised Amazon link

Edit 11 July 2010: Revised Amazon link