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Summary: Read this book, then read it again.
Review: I read Design Patterns, thought hey this is pretty neat, and set it aside. A while later I caught myself thinking in terms of the patterns outlined in the book, picked it up and re-read it. It was on the second reading that I was really struck by the knowledge contained. Moral: Make sure you read this book, and make sure you read this book more then once.
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Summary: Good introduction to the patterns topic
Review: Definitely a must-have classic book. It is well written and systematically structured. Every pattern is thorougly commented and an example (mostly in C++) is included. The book is held in an easy-to-understand langauge and is strongly advisable not only for architect-beginners, but also for programmers as well as experienced analysts.
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Summary: An OOT milestone
Review: Usefull for both beginners and seasoned designer who will learn: - new solutions to their recurrent problems. - a better understanding on the solutions they already know - a standard name to refer a pattern. Great idea, the best OOT book I've read 'till now.
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Summary: The next step in programming
Review: There are two types of programmers in the world--those that hack their way through problems and those that create works of beauty. Buying "How To" books and language references will teach you how to write the syntax to solve the problem; this book will take you to the next step of actually crafting a solution. It's not for beginners, though. You should be a seasoned hack before attempting this material. Even with 12 years experience, I'm still struggling with some concepts. C++ and/or Smalltalk experience is a plus since they are used for the examples. If you're sick of being 'just a programmer', buy it. You won't be sorry.
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Summary: Designer's deja-vu
Review: When I first encountered this book in 1996, I was charmed by it immediately. Being a designer of application frameworks and architecture, I recognized the construction we used and being described in Gamma's book very clearly. While reading the book we were able to improve the quality of our class libraries significantly. The book is fun reading, and deja-vu splashes of the pages. I stronly recommend 'Design patters' to everyone interested in OO (design) and CBD.
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Summary: A great and thoughtful presentation!!!
Review: This is a great book for anyone who wants to delve deep into the object oriented ocean and make some enlightening discoveries!. I as a developer with some experience was absolutely enthralled and enligthned My thanks to the authors who have put in a great job!!!!
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Summary: Definitely a must for any budding OO developers.
Review: Generally computer langauages are taught with too much emphasis on syntax, rather than the semantics. This book helps to illustrate how an object oriented language's behaviour can be used to solve problems at a higher level of abstraction.
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Summary: Essential reference for systems designers
Review: The design patterns presented in this book capture the experience of many experts in the OO system design field, and make that experience available to all designers. Don't expect it to solve all of your problems - this is a design book, NOT an implementation "cook"-book. I actually found that in some cases the examples were more of a distraction than a help, but as long as you can grasp abstract concepts, the text is invalueable.
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Summary: A must have for your collection
Review: Design patterns are to design what data structures are to implementation. We focus so much on lists, stacks, queues and trees, no college student of computer science is let out without knowing about them, yet the analogous fundamentals for architecture around which everything else hangs are forgotten about. Design patterns is a must, you have to write your software this way if you want to reuse the most reusable component of all of software, design. This is because it's language and library independent. They pull you up the abstraction layers with this book but they back it up with real examples and code. No BS here, just the culmination of many years work and deliberation by experts in the field. They're worth listening to.
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Summary: An excellent complement to the book of the same name.
Review: This CD should not be considered a replacement for the book, at least as long as you are like me and like the portability of a book, it's ability to record notes, etc. What John Vlissides and the folks at AWL have done very well is re-shaping the book to electronic form. This is not just a duplication of the book, but a genuine adaptation of the content to a different medium, in this case HTML. Perhaps most valuable for me is the ability to pop this in and do a full-text search. I still use the paper book, though. It would have rated 5 stars but for one thing: the inability to record notes within the medium. That's not the fault of the publisher or anyone--it's a difficult technical problem that hopefully someone will solve. I would heartily recommend this to consultants or anybody who doesn't necessarily have a "home base" because these are much easier to lug through airports than the hardcover GoF book. :-)
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