Well, I didn't like it. I guess this is a very important book, but I couldn't find the style pleasing.
The original patterns book was written in dry style, kind like a doctoral thesis, dense in concepts. This has the opposite problem, the patterns are much more extensively explained, with more examples, more relationship with other patterns, much more in-depth. What this makes is that I understand the patterns worse, because I grow tired of reading about the same. The original book had 23 patterns in 400 pages, this one has 16 patterns in 666 pages.

I still think it's a must read for somebody working in these domains, but not an easy read. ( )

The case study on the design of a multithreaded web server is really nice to give to advanced undergrdauates who are interested in high-performance web apps. Most of the book is a pattern catalog that hasn't found much application in my distributed projects so far. ( )