I read parts of the refactoring book (1st edition) when it came out to see what kind of refactorings the author mentions. Since I didn't remember much from it,

I read parts of the refactoring book (1st edition) when it came out to see what kind of refactorings the author mentions. Since I didn't remember much from it, I decided this year to take a look at the 2nd edition, which to my amusement is written in JavaScript. After reading the example refactoring at the beginning I abandoned the book, because it champions the "code as prose" idea, which is rightfully contradicted by Ousterhout in his "A Philosophy of Software Design". "Enterprise architecture" was not relevant for me, I wasn't doing any EA when I started reading it and quickly lost interest. The only potentially engaging topic was concurrency, but there are much better books available about that topic. "Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture" (I am only familiar with vol 1 & 2) has wider applicability and is more compelling in my opinion. And they have references and examples. For instance the Pipes & Filters architecture patterns gives UNIX [Bac86], CMS Pipelines [HRV95] and LASSPTools [Set95] as examples and references "The Pipeline Design Pattern" [VBT95]. I do see case studies and references, but not from these authors I mentioned.