The first example in the book is about developing and build a
house showing architectures that are relatively well-known. The
architecture is decomposed into four layers - environment, house, rooms and machinery.
After the house example, electronics architectures must be
examined. It is striking how similar they are to house drawings.
For the rest of examples, only two decomposition levels are used.
In this example, a multiplication toy should be implemented in
two ways. One variant with pure electronics as hard wired
network of gates, and one with a micro controller with an assembler
program.
The
third example moves over to software. A calculator element
performing the arithmetic logic should be developed, and used
both by a stand alone calculator and by a virtual windows
calculator. Again it is surprising how similar architectures are
to electronics and mechanics.
The
forth and last example is about a phone-book database
implemented in object oriented program. Can you admit
that architectures are powerful tools to visualize all kind of
product structures, even immaterial software ?