Review on the book "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know"
97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts, 1st Edition compiled by Richard Monson-Haefel, published by O'Reilly Media, Inc., in Feb 2009.
Interestingly we are seldom able to review a book before it is published. This is an exception. We read it through Safari Books Online before its publication on paper.
In this book, Monson-Haefel compiles 97 short articles written by different people. Before each article, there is a short bio and the author's photo. Since one author may write multiple articles, it may be better to put their bio either in the beginning or in the end of the book just in one place to avoid duplication.
For maximum reading benefit, it may be better to ignore who write these articles on first reading because you don't want the authors' credentials to affect your judgment.
Since each article is relatively short, you cannot expect the authors to expound on their statements lengthily. So reading it is more like a simple take-it-or-not though we would say most of them make perfect sense and some of them quite catch the eyes, such as Everything Will Ultimately Fail, Don't Be a Problem Solver, Your Customer Is Not Your Customer and etc.
You will also notice that some software architects agree on the same things and they appear multiple times in this book. For example, "Software Architect" Has Only Lowercase a's; Deal with It vs There Is No 'I' in Architecture, Control the Data, Not Just the Code vs Database As a Fortress vs It Is All About The Data , Everything Will Ultimately Fail vs Welcome to the Real World , Shortcuts Now Are Paid Back with Interest Later vs Pay Down Your Technical Debt and etc.
We don't know the meaning of the magic number 97, though in practice we probably can only remember a few bullet points at a time and we can introduce our 98th thing to know:
There are no magic number of things you should know in any field.
However despite that said, it is still beneficial to refresh our memory with the collective wisdom of these software architects from time to time.