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'Refactoring through deeper insight' is a theme that permeates the book, an agile approach advocated by Evans, to manage the complexity of software by a continuous process of discovery of domain knowledge and its representation. Through domain-driven design Evans' advocates iterative design and understanding. When a better understanding is achieved he encourages the developers to reflect that understanding in the software's design by refactoring.

The articulation of the patterns in conjunction with a good breakdown of key programming concepts provide an exceptionally clear presentation of software design with respect to alignment with the target domain. Each sub-topic is relevant, whilst the flow and structure of the whole book is maintained from building blocks through to large-scale structure.

I was rather surprised at the scarcity of references. Although the author refers to many influences 'in the air' during the incubation of this material, I would have expected to see reference to seminal works such as Jackson's 'Problem Frames' and Coplien's 'Multi-Paradigm Design for C++'. As it stands only a handful of books are mentioned and particular bias is given towards Martin Fowler who provides a forward for the book.

Irrespective of whether you feel agile software development is for you, I highly recommend this book as a source for insight into class, module and system design.