The whole thing, including 50 pages of end matter, weighs in over 700 pages. The writing is dense and packed with data. It's a real goldmine of information.

The problem is that a goldmine, these days, typically yields one gram of gold per tonne of ore. Extracting this book's information, the real usable content, from its data is about like extracting that gram. Maybe that's appropriate, though. Framework development is not as well understood as lots of other kinds of software, and the first step in any science is to collect specimens. I've found my nuggets in this book, as other readers have found theirs, but different people find different nuggets according to their needs and interests.

If you have an active interest in framework development, and if you have time and energy to distill over 650 pages of raw data on your own, this book may be for you. It really is not for the beginner or the casual reader, though.

It's easy to get a good rating for your book if you are without scruples and don't even have the smallest ethics.

Volume 1 lays the fundamental concepts supporting object-oriented frameworks, and describes the problems and challenges that this
technology raises in software development. The book covers topics such as domain analysis, development concepts and approaches,
documentation, and management, among others. Of course, the compilation of articles makes some parts little redundant, but this is a minor detail compared with the fruitful contributions made by the book. In particular, the articles on reusing hooks, hot-spot-driven development, composing modeling frameworks in Catalysis, and composition problems, causes and solutions, are a sample of the outstanding level of this work. Each chapter adds at the end a number of related questions and student projects aiming to reinforce concepts and promote further investigation. As a comment, novice readers should take the sections concerning hooks and hot-spots carefully because these topics are presented in a slightly confusing way.

Volume 2 focuses on specific framework implementations, dealing with existing frameworks for different application domains, such as businesses, multi-agent systems, languages and system software. In this book, the readers will find a level of detail much closer to specific implementations issues than in the previous volume. Nonetheless, the writing style remains mostly clear and accessible for a quite broad audience. The case-studies and experience reports described by the articles show an attractive industrial perspective of the framework approach, and more important, they go an step forward in the road of a more mature discipline for software development. In addition, a
CD-Rom with concrete examples of these applications is included with the book.

Volume 3 completes this series with a number of domain-specific application frameworks developed by industry, showing how to apply the concepts and ideas of the previous books in software products. In this line, it includes very interesting frameworks for manufacturing systems and distributed systems, among others. It also goes through concrete software scenarios, illustrating the benefits of combining domain knowledge and object-orientation expertise. Although the level of the articles is rather odd, the volume certainly provides the readers a realistic picture of the problems of building and adapting frameworks by learning from others' experience. A CD-Rom is also included with this book.

Overall, these framework books collect the state-of-the-art on framework development, offering a comprehensive and
easy-to-understand guide for both academics and practitioners in the field. It is clear that framework technologies will not solve all the problems (perhaps they rise more challenges than current approaches), however, taking advantage of the framework possibilities can make your development process more repeatable, productive, and also less painful. The gains of this retrain are no doubt a good investment.