Amy Brown and Greg Wilson, editors of The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Elegance, Evolution, and a Few Fearless Hacks (Lulu.com, 2011, 978-1-257-63801-7), have placed their entire volume of essays online under a Creative Commons license.
It's a collection of essays about the architecture of some familiar software products:
…[M]ost software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another's mistakes rather than building on one another's successes. This book's goal is to change that. In it, the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why.
In addition to the original chapters on products such as Audacity, Bash, Eclipse, and Hadoop, the community has undertaken chapters on Derby, PostgreSQL, and several other projects. Translations are also underway.
Check it out!
