Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)

This book does a great job of explaining patterns and pointing out benefits and drawbacks to each one. As an aspiring OO developer of business applications though, this books does not provide much guidance. The examples are given for real-time applications like user interfaces for a drawing application, etc. Applying these patterns to a distributed application with a database backend that records everything is a tough leap to make. I give it a high rating because it does its job well, however, I wish it would have addressed a broader scope of application types.

Although this book initiated the now-famous design patterns phenemon,I think we have better alternatives these days.The book has sample codes in C++.

I personally liked Head First Design Patterns.

Everyone who wants to write OO code needs to read this book. No, let me re-phrase, *must master* this book.

When you have *mastered* this book, we will award you a blue belt and you can then move on to Martin Fowler's book.

If you don't know which book I mean by "Martin Fowlers" book, you haven't mastered this book. So don't expect the blue belt until you do.

Expect only beatings with the blue belt.

"Design Patterns" (GoF = Gang of Four) is a signicant and, in many ways, a difficult work for the modern reader (me) to digest. The material in this book is highly self-referential: to understand a particular design pattern, it is important to be familiar with many similar, if not all, design patterns.

I would like to offer a suggestion about an approach that worked well for me. As an introduction to the patterns field, I first read "Head First Design Patterns", which offers a highly competent but light-hearted presentation of the same patterns covered by GoF. The Head First book gave me a thorough overview of the patterns landscape, as well as gently drilling me on pattern application. The Head First book goes out of its way to provoke the thinking reader, while being the most entertaining computer science text that I have ever read.

With this introduction, I found "Design Patterns" to be a much more accessible and friendlier work.

Like many of the typical Computer Science classical texts, you've got to read it, if only to say you read it :-)

True, the book is C++ focused (it will be somewhat tough for those who only know Java / C#) and it has quite a level of sophistication (probably aimed at those in a Computer Science degree or master's programs). But, that said, it really started a big part of the revolution in OO - open source gave us reusable code, but design patterns gave us reusable solutions to design problems; and this was the book that really "lit the fire" for patterns.

If you read this then you don't need to read too many more design pattern books as most of them are just regurgitations on the themes outlined here. I've learned so many great solutions from this which I use and re-use in my software development year after year.

I didn't give it 5 stars simply as it's a tough read at times and sometimes you need to re-read a paragraph / section just to make sure you understood what was said.