First of all, the book is more of an academic book. I have no problem with this as the Design Patterns book produced by the GoF was written in the same manner, but the language and tone could have more informal to make it a more enjoyable read for the working architect rather than the university student.

That not really being the real issue, there are many chapters in this book that are almost useless to read. I understand this book shouldn't be read from cover-to-cover (seeing as the chapters have hardly any real order to them - another bad point), but reading about a smalltalk framework for something so trivial and talking about it's significance for a hundred pages or so doesn't make me learn anything - simular to the Mythical Man Month. I'm sure these kinds of chapters or books even are an important, integral part of computer science and should be captured, but this isn't the book I'm afraid.

The chapters on example frameworks, although helpful, didn't tell the reader a lot of inforamtion. For instance, the Hypermedia framework was written as it was being told with an overview. Although the patterns and some driving design decisions were made, the actual purpose of the framework was unclear until the end of the chapter that I put in the missing pieces myself. The author wrote it like a review or an abstract to a larger case study - which doesn't help those that truly want to understand what's going on.

The chapters on formalizing and understanding frameworks, although I appreiciate the academic effort to describing frameworks, were useless reads as well. As an architect that has built many frameworks and continues to do so, their so-called "simplified model" couldn't even potentially describe half the frameworks i've built. For a book that is supposed to be the "definitive guide/reference" on frameworks, it most surely doesn't meet to the level of frameworks being produced in the enterprise today. Perhaps volumes 2 and 3 can clear this up.

Given all this, however, the book has some good chapters, albeit reviews and abstracts of white papers and other books. If you really want to start building frameworks, maybe this would be a good start, but I'd recommend Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Software, Refactoring, EJB Design Patterns and many other books about advanced OO and designing software that focus on the "smaller" elements of producing frameworks instead. If you truely understand these works, learning how to build frameworks is almost trivial and you won't really need to read this book. Maybe I'm just smart too, I dunno - you decide.

Just my thoughts - hope that helps someone's buying decision.

Volume 1, "Building Application Frameworks", addresses several problematic topics crucial to the success of object-oriented application frameworks. It presents a complete reference on how to develop a good application framework and provides guidelines for dealing with issues related to application frameworks.

Volume 2, "Implementing Application Frameworks", illustrates the development and use of frameworks technology in several domains, such as business, artificial intelligence, agents, tools, environments, and system applications. It describes diverse application frameworks and discusses real-world experience.

Volume 3, "Domain-Specific Application Frameworks", provides valuable insight into successful application framework examples. All the material is presented in a practical, easy-to-understand manner.

I strongly recommend this three-volume reference for anybody planning to use the hottest technologies related to software reuse, frameworks, in the software development process.

First book, "Building Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Foundations of Framework Design" introduces application frameworks, their benefits and problems. It addresses all the fundamental concepts behind OO application frameworks and provides guidelines for OO application framework development. It is organized in eight parts. Part one provides a complete overview of OO application framework technology describing what is an application framework, what are the problems and benefits of application frameworks and how to use, develop and evaluate an application framework. Part Two presents some historical application frameworks and discusses some general guidelines to increase the reusability of application frameworks. Part Three describes how to build a framework analysing a concrete domain. The rest of the book provides all the necessary information to completely build an application framework. It presents all the concepts managed in framework development, which are the different development approaches, how to test the resulting frameworks, the problems derived from integration and a question sometimes forgotten but very important, the framework documentation.

Second book, "Domain-Specific Application Frameworks: Frameworks Experience by Industry" is focused in the experience of industrial and academic contributors in the development of OO application framework in different domains. Each chapter covers step by step the complete development of an application framework in manufacturing, distributed systems, real-time systems, telecommunication, multimedia, chemistry and data visualization domains. It includes the motivation developers founded to choose application framework technology, the problems they had to solve and the final solutions they developed.

Third book, "Implementing Application Frameworks: Object-Oriented Frameworks at Work", shows step by step how to implement application frameworks in different domains. It is organized in six parts covering examples about i) Business Frameworks with different examples in sales and administrative domains, ii) Artificial Intelligence, iii) Agent Application Frameworks, presenting interesting frameworks for speech recognition, neural networks and agents. iv) Specialized tool frameworks, v) Language Specific Frameworks, vi) System Application Frameworks, which present and analyse the application of OO frameworks in combination with other methodologies as component-oriented programming, language constructs or constraint programming and vi) Experiences in Application Frameworks. This last section is very useful because analyse the lessons learned using the application framework technology.