What makes ``professional programming'' different from naive programming? The answer lies in use of structures---control structures (sequencing, conditionals, iteration, parallelism), data structures (arrays, stacks, trees), and component structures (modules, classes, objects, packages). Professional programmers understand how to employ properly all three forms of structure; amateurs do not. Further, patterns of structures-within-structures define architectures that are learned and regularly imitated by professionals. As indicated by its title, this text presents standard architectures for component construction and patterns of control construction and data construction.

The text takes a ``modern'' approach by emphasizing component structures over the other two forms. Computing has matured into a distributed, component-based activity, where both computer hardware and software are assembled from standardized components and connected together by means of standardized interfaces. By no means does this text ignore the classic developments of control and data structures---they appear in due course at an appropriate level of detail. But component-level issues drive the software design process, and the text emphasizes this fact.