[LRUG] Architecture Of Things

[Zoltan Biber]

Hi all,

I’m working with Ruby / Rails for about 1.5 years now, loving the language, the framework and the open source world but as I work on a complex app at my job
it is always the stack/architecture of things that can be difficult to master (e.g. the order in which code is executed in the stack). Would be keen to hear some opinions from fellow LRUG-ers:

1. Can you suggest a good book on Software Engineering / Software Architecture suitable as a first read on the topic? 
    Fresh stuff that is up-do-date with SOA,Microservices and Cloud Computing would be great.
    It looks to me that the above have (completely) changed the ballgame but I might be wrong and the core fundamentals are absolutely the same?
    Bonus: Is there a good book covering s. architecture built around Ruby/Rails? Or is that clashing with the generalist (language agnostic) approach of s.engineering?     
    I tend to find loads of tutorials that tell you WHAT to do and HOW but not so much about the WHY (in the grand scheme of things).
    
2. How did any of you guys transition from a newbie to that engineer level stating the year when you started from zero and education.
    Here we have to distinguish between people starting web development in the ‘old days’ and ’nowadays’ because
    in the old days people had the pain of not having the plethora of tools/documentation/tutorials available today but also the luxury of learning a 
    new tool/technology incrementally as the number of moving parts was much less and new tools were not released by minute.
 

Thank you,
Zoltan