Comments about oreilly Microsoft® Application Architecture Guide:

For the people like me, by which I mean programmers using the object oriented paradigm, but not familiar with patterns and application architecture issues, the book "Microsoft Application Architecture Guide" is a must-have one. It explains the subject in the manner understandable for the beginners like me, but at the same time it contains plenty of useful information for people working as architect engineers for long time - its electronic edition available on MSDN is a bible for many of my colleagues including the experienced programmers. What may be surprising, not all of them work with Microsoft technologies. Therefore I can recommend you this book no matter whether you are an architect (it can teach you more) or just a beginner (it will take you to the next level of software engineering).