The best Software Design & Architecture online courses &  Tutorials to Learn Software Design & Architecture  for beginners to advanced level.

The software architecture of a system depicts the system’s organization or structure, and provides an explanation of how it behaves. A system represents the collection of components that accomplish a specific function or set of functions. In other words, the software architecture provides a sturdy foundation on which software can be built.

A series of architecture decisions and trade-offs impact quality, performance, maintainability, and overall success of the system. Failing to consider common problems and long-term consequences can put your system at risk.

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Top Software Design & Architecture Courses, Tutorials, Certifications List

1. SOLID Principles of Object-Oriented Design and Architecture
2. Software Design and Architecture
3. Data Structures and Software Design
4. Secure Software Design
5. Java Programming: Principles of Software Design
6. Software Construction: Object-Oriented Design
7. Basics of Software Architecture & Design Patterns in Java
8. Software Architecture: Meta and SOLID Principles in C#
9. Microservices Software Architecture: Patterns and Techniques
10. Java Design Patterns - The Complete Masterclass

1. SOLID Principles of Object-Oriented Design and Architecture

Master SOLID principles and embrace clean and maintainable software architecture.

• Course rating: 4.7 out of 5.0 (996 Ratings total)
• Duration: 4.5 Hours
• Certificate: Certificate of completion

With this course, you will:

• Learn the fundamental theory of SOLID principles
• See how each individual SOLID principle relates to software architecture
• Understand the scope of applicability of SOLID principles
• Discover the prominence and the value of abstractions in software development

In this course you're going to deep dive into SOLID principles of object-oriented design and architecture. These principles embody decades of academic research and industry experience with object-oriented software architecture, and best software developers use them on a daily basis to write clean and maintainable code. You'll learn the fundamental theory behind each individual SOLID principle and understand the respective benefits and scope of applicability. To make the course practically useful, the course will demonstrate you non-trivial, real-world examples and discuss how these principles affect the design and the architecture of software systems. SOLID principles were introduced about 20 years ago, but the body of knowledge they incorporate is much older than that.

These five principles reflect at least 40 years of academic research and industry experience with software design and architecture, shared by the most prominent members of software community: Robert Martin, Michael Feathers, Martin Fowler, Kent Beck and more. SOLID principles constitute a sound foundation and provide actionable guidelines for writing clean and maintainable code. SOLID code is flexible and is coupled to exactly right degree to achieve cohesive and expandable architecture. Such code is much more pleasant to work with and constitutes a true reason for professional pride. In the past decades, SOLID became integral part of software developers' lexicon because these principles enable efficient dialog about software design and architecture. They will guide you when you work on the initial design proposal and will be very useful later during architectural reviews. You will also find references to SOLID principles in many blogs and books about software architecture, and you will often hear them mentioned at software conferences. Therefore, if you want to be able to speak the language of software developers, you need to understand SOLID principles. If you're a professional software developer working in an object-oriented language - this course is for you.

You can take SOLID Principles of Object-Oriented Design and Architecture  Certificate Course on Udemy.

2. Software Design and Architecture

Learn Software Design and Architecture from University of Alberta. In the Software Design and Architecture Specialization, you will learn how to apply design principles, patterns, and architectures to create reusable and flexible software.

• Course rating: 4.6 out of 5.0 (2,996 Ratings total)
• Duration: 48 Hours
• Certificate: Certificate of completion

With this course, you will:

• Apply the Class Responsibility Collaborator (CRC) technique to analyze and design the object-oriented model for a problem.
• Explain and apply object-oriented modeling principles and their purpose (e.g., abstraction, encapsulation, decomposition, generalization).
• Explain and apply different types of inheritance
• Explain the difference between association, aggregation, and composition dependencies.
• Express object-oriented models as Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams.
• Translate between UML class diagrams and equivalent Java code.
• Apply design guidelines for modularity, separation of concerns, information hiding, and conceptual integrity to create a flexible, reusable, maintainable design.
• Explain the tradeoff between cohesion and coupling.
• Demonstrate how to use design patterns to address user interface design issues.
• Identify the most suitable design pattern to address a given application design problem.
• Apply design principles (e.g., open-closed, dependency inversion, least knowledge).
• Critique code by identifying and refactoring anti-patterns.
• Apply the model-view-controller architectural pattern.

In the Software Design and Architecture Specialization, you will learn how to apply design principles, patterns, and architectures to create reusable and flexible software applications and systems. You will learn how to express and document the design and architecture of a software system using a visual notation. Practical examples and opportunities to apply your knowledge will help you develop employable skills and relevant expertise in the software industry.

This course takes Java beginners to the next level by covering object-oriented analysis and design. You will discover how to create modular, flexible, and reusable software, by applying object-oriented design principles and guidelines. And, you will be able to communicate these designs in a visual notation known as Unified Modelling Language (UML). You will be challenged in the Capstone Project to apply your knowledge of object-oriented design by evolving and documenting the Java codebase for an Android application with corresponding UML documentation. This course extends object-oriented analysis and design by incorporating design patterns to create interactive applications.

Through a survey of established design patterns, you will gain a foundation for more complex software applications. Finally, you will identify problematic software designs by referencing a catalog of code smells. You will be challenged in the Capstone Project to redesign an existing Java-based Android application to implement a combination of design patterns. You will also critique a given Java codebase for code smells.

In the Capstone Project you will document a Java-based Android application with UML diagrams and analyze evaluate the application’s architecture using the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM).

You can take Software Design and Architecture  Certificate Course on Coursera.

3. Data Structures and Software Design

Knowing how to code is only part of the skills needed to become a professional software developer. This course, part of the CS Essentials for Software Development Professional Certificate program, will take your skills to the next level by teaching you how to write “good” software that appropriately represents and organizes data, is easy to maintain, and is of high quality.

• Course rating: 31,816 total enrollments
• Duration: 36 Hours
• Certificate: Certificate of completion

With this course, you will:

• Efficient means of storing and retrieving data in a Java program
• How to identify the data structure that best represents the problem at hand
• Use of the inbuilt Java data structures
• Assess and improve the quality of software design with respect to object-oriented principles
• Convert a set of requirements into a high-quality software design
• How to write efficient code that is easy to read, understand, and modify

As the purpose of most computer programs is to manipulate data, sometimes large quantities of it, the manner in which programs represent and organize data can have an enormous effect on the simplicity and efficiency of the code. In this course, you will learn about important core data structures such as arrays, lists, stacks, queues, sets, maps, trees, and graphs, and learn how to evaluate them and reason about their behavior and efficiency. Most importantly, you will learn how to determine which data structure is the most appropriate for solving the problem at hand, and see how to use the implementations that are part of the Java library.

However, choosing the right data structure is only part of the challenge of developing high quality software: you must also consider the design of the classes that use those data structures. You will learn about software design principles such as modularity, functional independence, and abstraction, and apply those concepts toward writing programs that are easy to understand, easy to modify, and easy to test. Although it is important to know how to write high quality code, professional software developers often spend a majority of their time maintaining existing code. You will also learn about software refactoring techniques for improving the design of existing code, and see how to improve code efficiency. This course will use Java but the concepts you learn can be applied to almost all modern programming languages.

You can take Data Structures and Software Design Certificate Course on EDX.

4. Secure Software Design

Learn Secure Software Design from University of Colorado System. Information security is an extremely important topic in our world today. As individuals, we seek to protect our personal information while the corporations we work for have to.

• Course rating: 4.7 out of 5.0 (438 Ratings total)
• Duration: 56 Hours
• Certificate: Certificate of completion

With this course, you will:

• Outline the composition of the Arduino development board
• Secure design
• UML, unit testing, and ethics
• Effective user interfaces
• Database design

Information security is an extremely important topic in our world today. As individuals, we seek to protect our personal information while the corporations we work for have to protect suppliers, customers, and company assets. Creating secure software requires implementing secure practices as early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) as possible. This Specialization focuses on ensuring security as part of software design and is for anyone with some workplace experience in software development who needs the background, perspective, and skills to recognize important security aspects of software design. You’ll consider secure design for multiple SDLC models, software architecture considerations, and design patterns. You’ll understand how to identify and implement secure design when considering databases, UML, unit testing, and ethics. Mindsets and attitudes of successful designers—and hackers—are presented as well as project successes and failures. Always at the core of front-end design will be user experience and you will have the opportunity to ensure clean and effective user interfaces that also serve to provide the best security. Back-end development topics such as database design are also covered.

This course talks about software development lifecycles a description/prescription for how we write software. Design is a step in this life cycle, and the course explores the implications of this. Design has a role in the life cycle; it is always there, regardless of the kind of life cycle we’re talking about. Why is that? Why was design considered as a step in this life cycle? The design step in developing software has some unique characteristics. First of all, it’s the only step where drawing pictures of things is the norm. Why is that? What do pictures do that other representations cannot do? Pictures have varying levels of detail; pictures have context. Pictures…paint a picture. Why are these things important? In this course, too, we begin looking at other disciplines (building architecture is a favorite one) for lessons on design. Since many software developers are compulsive coders, they have created software over the years to help them do their job. There are tools which make design and its associated tasks easier. The course introduces some basic tools and techniques to help you with design. Tools aren’t always tangible, however. The last two lessons of this course discuss questions of Ethics in software development. The purpose here is, as with tools, to equip you to better carry our your responsibilities as a designer. Students will be required to have a prior knowledge of writing and delivering software and some programming knowledge in java. The design step in developing software has some unique characteristics.

You can take Secure Software Design Course on Coursera.

5. Java Programming: Principles of Software Design

Learn Java Programming: Principles of Software Design from Duke University. Solve real world problems with Java using multiple classes. Learn how to create programming solutions that scale using Java interfaces. Recognize that software.

• Course rating: 4.6 out of 5.0 (1,207 Ratings total)
• Duration: 13 Hours
• Certificate: Certificate of completion

With this course, you will:

• Write programs that include multiple classes and ArrayLists of class types
• Find the maximum value in an ArrayList
• Use a Filter interface to search through data
• Implement interfaces with method signatures
• Combine several filters together
• Use sorting appropriately in solving problems
• Develop classes that implement the Comparable interface
• Use timing data to analyze empirical performance
• Break problems into multiple classes, each with their own methods
• Determine if a class from the Java API can be used in solving a particular problem
• Implement programming solutions using multiple approaches and recognize tradeoffs
• Use object-oriented concepts including interfaces and abstract classes when developing programs
• Appropriately hide implementation decisions so they are not visible in public methods
• Recognize the limitations of algorithms and Java programs in solving problems.
• Recognize standard Java classes and idioms including exception-handling, static methods, java.net, and java.io packages.

Solve real world problems with Java using multiple classes. Learn how to create programming solutions that scale using Java interfaces. Recognize that software engineering is more than writing code - it also involves logical thinking and design. By the end of this course you will have written a program that analyzes and sorts earthquake data, and developed a predictive text generator.  Welcome to “Java Programming: Principles of Software Design”!

In this introductory module, you will hear an overview of this course and be introduced to the supporting resources available. In this module, we will introduce a data set containing details about earthquakes around the world. You will learn how to pull this data into a program, search through the data, and filter the data based on desired criteria.  You will learn how to implement a selection sort and a bubble sort, then be introduced to a Java method Collections.sort, which sorts with much greater efficiency.

You can take Java Programming: Principles of Software Design Course on Coursera.

6. Software Construction: Object-Oriented Design

This course, part of the Software Development MicroMasters program, will dig deep into the principles of object oriented design, and introduce new abstraction techniques and design patterns.

• Course rating: 23,404 total enrollments
• Duration: 54 Hours
• Certificate: Certificate of completion

With this course, you will:

• How to read and use software design patterns
• To implement and test an object-oriented design
• How to develop an application using online services and APIs

You will use these techniques to build an application that makes use of popular online services and APIs – the most complex software design project so far. By the end of the course, you will have a solid foundation in Java and Object-Oriented Design, as well as many software development concepts that can be applied to any language. Learners who enroll in the Verified track will receive staff grading for the course project and increased interaction with the instructors and staff.

You can take Software Construction: Object-Oriented Design  Certificate Course on EDX.

7. Basics of Software Architecture & Design Patterns in Java

A guide to create smart, reusable software's with SOLID principles and design patterns.

• Course rating: 4.4 out of 5.0 (1,702 Ratings total)
• Duration: 4.5 Hours
• Certificate: Certificate of completion

With this course, you will:

• SOLID principles
• Design patterns
• Object oriented design

This course is about software architecture and design patterns. We will talk about two man topics: SOLID principles and design patterns. We are going to implement the problems in Java, but the theoretical background is language-independent. I highly recommend typing out the implementations several times on your own in order to get a good grasp of it. Section 1: what are SOLID principles single responsibility principle open closed principle Liskov's substitution principle interface segregation principle dependency inversion principle Section 2: what are behavioral design patterns strategy pattern observer pattern command pattern iterator pattern template pattern and null object pattern visitor pattern Section 3: what are creational design pattern singleton pattern factory pattern builder pattern Section 4: what is structural design pattern decorator pattern facade pattern adapter pattern Section 5: the model-view-controller (MVC) model application in Java with MVC In the first part of the course we are going to learn about the SOLID principles. We are going to talk about the theory as well as the implementations. The second part of the course is about design patterns. We should have a deep understanding of these patterns in order to be able to write reusable software components. These techniques are becoming more and more important as applications are getting more and more complex, so - in my opinion - these topics are good to know. Thank for joining the course, let's get started! Who this course is for: This course is meant for newbies who are familiar with Java and want to be able to write reusable code

You can take Basics of Software Architecture & Design Patterns in Java Course on Udemy.

8. Software Architecture: Meta and SOLID Principles in C#

Learn how to develop maintainable software systems applying Design Patterns based on Meta and SOLID Principles.

• Course rating: 4.4 out of 5.0 (684 Ratings total)
• Duration: 5 Hours
• Certificate: Certificate of completion

With this course, you will:

• Determine if a class has too many responsibilities
• Apply SRP to make classes more granular
• Determine the smell of duplication caused by OCP violation
• Apply OCP to remove or prevent duplications
• Make client's lives more enjoyable by applying ISP, making interfaces more granular
• Determine LSP violations which break client's code
• Apply LSP to come up with proper inheritance
• Apply DIP to develop plugin architecture
• Build your own simple IoC-Container
• Build clean API in C#

SOLID is an acronym which stands for SRP, OCP, LSP, ISP and DIP. These five acronyms in their turn stand for: Single Responsibility Principle Open/Closed Principle Liskov Substitution Principle Interface Segregation Principle Dependency Inversion Principle.

In this course, you’ll learn how to apply meta and SOLID principles so that your application will live a long healthy life. It means you are going to learn how to write code of the high quality: readable, understandable and reliable. Improve your knowledge in object-oriented programming. Understand the meta principles on which all the other development principles are based. Understand the symptoms of code defects. Learn the foundations of SOLID principles. Learn how to detect the violations of SOLID principles and how to fix the problems. Learn how meta principles and SOLID principles are related to each other and how to find the balance between them. Foundations of writing object-oriented code Despite the fact that C# is a very rich on features language, it's very common to see poorly designed and implemented applications in a real world. Language by itself does not guarantee that the architecture of an application will be great.

In order to design and build maintainable software, we need to understand the principles of software development. This video course is exactly about how to achieve clean and maintainable software. You probably have already heard the following well-known statement: most code sucks. Well, this course is all about how to produce code which doesn't suck. Owning skills of producing a well-designed and well-implemented types is the prerequisite for the other developers to treat you as a decent professional. Content and Overview. This course is aimed at middle and senior developers. Solid experience in C# is required. There are plenty of code examples throughout this course so that you will learn both theoretical and practical material. Starting with SOLID principles we will go further to the meta-principles. Going through the SOLID principles, you’ll also learn about the related patterns. Then we will get to the problem of contradictions between different principles. You’ll learn about the relationships between SOLID principles and meta principles. In general, you’ll learn in this course: SRP OCP LSP ISP DIP These are the SOLID principles. You’ll learn the background problems that can be solved by particular principle, you’ll see the demonstrations in code, you’ll learn the related patterns to every principle. Learning DIP you’ll in addition learn what is Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control, IoC-Containers and what are the architectural implications of DI.

You can take Software Architecture: Meta and SOLID Principles in C# Certificate Course on Udemy.

9. Microservices Software Architecture: Patterns and Techniques

Learn how to design and implement microservice systems using the right architecture design patterns and techniques.

• Course rating: 4.2 out of 5.0 (6,818 Ratings total)
• Duration: 1 Hour
• Certificate: Certificate of completion

With this course, you will:

• Learn about microservices architecture
• Learn how to implement software architecture patterns for a distributed system to allow scalability whilst maintaining consistency
• Learn techniques to help you in the design, development, deployment and monitoring of your microservice based system
• Identify technical challenges and common pitfalls

In this course you will learn in detail the software architecture patterns and techniques to develop robust and scalable microservices We will go through techniques and design patterns that are required in enterprise architecture including : Event Sourcing pattern Saga pattern Microservice Registration Circuitbreaker pattern API compostion Two Phase Commit Microservice Discovery.

The course is structured around both video tutorials explaining different techniques and architecture patterns, and (optional) assignments to help make sure you're understanding what we're learning. I'm also available to answer any queries you may have regarding any course material which you didn't understand or would like further detail on. This course is highly recommended for any developer who wants to move on to a senior position or software architect role. However, it will also be a good start for beginner to introduce them to proper coding practices early on.

You can take Microservices Software Architecture: Patterns and Techniques  Certificate Course on Udemy.

10. Java Design Patterns - The Complete Masterclass

Master Java Design Patterns and Write Robust and Extensible Software.

• Course rating: 4.5 out of 5.0 (453 Ratings total)
• Duration: 10 Hours
• Certificate: Certificate of completion

With this course, you will:

• Master Java Design Patterns
• Apply Design Patterns to Real-World Projects
• Build Software that's Robust and Flexible Using Java Design Patterns
• Solve common Software architecture problems with Java Design Patterns

This course is tailored for anyone who has working Java, or any OOP Programming Knowledge and are looking to dive deeper into the core of Software Development principles - Design Patterns. This course is designed to teach you everything you need to know about Java Design Patterns so you can apply what you learn into your projects. If you are reading this is because you know the value of learning Design Patterns as a Programmer - Design Patterns is the common denominator you need to master in order to build excellent Software, and build systems that actually work they way they should work. If you are looking to get a job as an Android developer, or start a freelance career in Android Development, you MUST have a solid Android Developing experience as well as a stunning portfolio to back that up. This course will teach you how to grow your Android Development knowledge while building up your portfolio. You will be building several Android Apps from the get go.

If you want to become: a highly paid Professional Programmer an expert Developer companies want to hire a Freelancer Developer who builds Top-notch Applications and systems a person who can design and architect software using Design Patterns a programmer who really understand Java Design Patterns and how to implement them in a code base. You'll be immersed into Design Patterns in Java from the first lecture to the end. You will also receive a Certificate of Completion so you can present to your potential employer. You see, out there on the Internet, you can find a lot of information, but the problem is that everything is scattered around and very frustrating to actually learn the right way since all you get is fragments of information.

You can take Java Design Patterns - The Complete Masterclass Certificate Course on Udemy.

Thank you for reading this. We hope our course curation would help you to pick the right course to learn Software Design & Architecture. In case you want to explore more, you can take the free Software Design & Architecture courses.

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