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

After years of writing code of all kinds,

Fun Video games as a kid,
Compilers for the heck of it,
Graphics programs for the love of art,
Interesting AI programs because I am a CS guy,
Boring Database Applications because I have to pay bills,
Nifty n-tiered web apps because the World went crazy..,

I found a programming book that could still teach me something.

After books from Knuth, Djikstra, The Aho Gang and the like, here is a book which goes straight to the point.

The book summarizes a basic set of Software Design Patterns, which have been found over and over in all the software we create.
Design Patterns is the perfect answer to all you OOP questions, Its an approach to sofware design as well as reuse.

If you are an artist, you would appreciate Design patterns better. The masters of the Renaissance began to see the world in terms of basic geometric forms..Spheres, Cubes, Cones and cylinders..this helped them in analysing an object..(any object, from the Human body to the Mountains and rivers.). Once they analysed any thing into its basic forms it was just a matter of detail. So, if you practice how to draw these basic shapes from different angles, and lighting,etc., and you learn how to analyse any thing into basic shapes, you have become a master.

The authors categorize all different software pieces into Creational, Structural and Behavioural patterns. Providing several possible patterns in each of these categories. A software designer, when confronted with a design problem, based on the needs, can pick a pattern from this catalogue and then fill in the details.

Well written, with UML diagrams too.

Caution: If you are new to programming, come back to this book a bit later.


A Great Reference Book   July 11, 2006
A. J. King (Phoenix, AZ USA)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

This is my primary resource for reference purposes. It's my first stop when I need a specific pattern. I recommend the Head First book for learning; this book for the basic patterns; and Martin Fowler's Enterprise Application Architecture book if you are designing business applications. Also, Partha Kuchana's Design Patterns in Java book is great if you are using Java.


Expand your programming vocabulary...difficult but worth it   June 24, 2000
Craig Patchett (Encinitas, CA United States)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

This is a book that you need to chew on for a while and which will take a while to digest once swallowed. It will, however, turn into pure programming muscle as payback for all your effort!

This is an academic treatise (it started out as a Master's thesis) and reads like one. But as you read you'll find yourself identifying with some of the patterns that you've unknowingly used in your own code. And you'll start seeing how you could have used other patterns. And before you know it, your approach to programming has changed and you are able to focus more on the domain-specific issues rather than getting caught up in the need to continuously re-invent the proverbial wheel. And the world looks a little bit brighter.

Any book that does that for you deserves 5 stars regardless of how dry it is.


A core book for any OO programmer.   June 15, 2000
Vincent O'Sullivan (London, England.)
15 out of 15 found this review helpful

In modern computer languages such as Java, creating Objects is a trivial task and almost as easy is making small numbers of Objects work together. However, there is a world of a difference between coding simple programs and developing commercial grade applications. Complexity increases exponentially. Something more is required in order to keep a handle on things. Design Patterns largely provide that answer.

Initially, this book is daunting. At first I couldn't make head nor tail of what they were talking about. This revealed serious shortcomings in my own knowledge that I had to put right but once done and starting with simple patterns (such as the Singleton) things began to make sense. Persevere and there is an awful lot of knowledge to be gained here. The intelligent application of Design Patterns into complex systems pays off hansomely in the long run.

My only critisisms of the book? Fairly minor really. The diagrams are all pre-UML. In fact they are they're own version of OMT diagrams. And an over reliance on Smalltalk for providing examples.

In the five years this book has been published much new work has been done on Design Patterns and it's time for a new edition of the book. Nevertheless, there aren't many computing books that are five years old and still of prime relevance. This is one.