I suggest Beautiful Architecture from O'Reilly. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517984/ http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517984/ http://www.amazon.com/Beau

I suggest Beautiful Architecture from O'Reilly. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517984/ http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517984/ http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Architecture-Leading-Thinkers-Software/dp/059651798X http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Architecture-Leading-Thinker... It's similar to Beautiful Code (also mentioned here) with various chapters on different, independent topics: e.g. Facebook's data-centric architecture, Xen hypervisor, etc.