From the reviews it sounds mainly from the OO/Java and heavy design up front paradigm and not very Agile / test driven. Is that fair? I'd really like a philosophically minded book that integrates these relatively newer approaches.
I consider myself very agile/test-driven-leaning and I got a lot out of the book. It provided nice restatements of many things I've vaguely thought over the years and some nice new ideas.
The book came out of Ousterhout's course on software design where he reviews student code as they work on a significant problem - building a text editor. There is very little (if any) material out there of this nature that goes much beyond personal opinion (usually under the guise of experience) and sloganeering. This one though, is a hearty dive into the delectable details of design.