Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design (2nd Edition) (Software Patterns Series)

In my humble opinion, I think this should be the first design pattern book to read for beginners. The GoF book can be a bit overwhelming for the newbie.

The book is well written and easy to follow. The coverage of each pattern is short and the explanation is straight forward. The diagrams and side-notes help to illustrate what is going on. After reading this book, you should be ready to tackle the GoF book.

I have seen developer who knows quite a number of design patterns, but still produce terrible design, because they don't know when and where to apply.

If you want to increase your number on design patterns, this is the wrong book for you. If you want to learn the design principles behind most of the design patterns, such as open-closed principle, single responsibility principle and favor aggregation over inheritance principle, this is a must-read.

This books is the best introduction to object oriented design. I've been working as a programmer for several years now but I was never confident with my knowledge of object oriented design. This book shows you the way with commonality variability analysis and the author augments traditional inheritance based object oriented design with design patterns by using aggregation instead of inheritance. He shows how the design patterns can lead to better object oriented design.

It's a textbook.
I needed it for a class.
Your mileage may vary.

This book gives an excellent insight into using some of the patters described in the classic book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series). It explains the reasons why particular patterns are useful and how they can be implemented to solve real-world problems.