Design Patterns

Rating:
Summary: Still good, after all those years...
Review: I first read this book six years ago. It was the right time at my carrer. I had just finished a C++ project that hadn't gone so well.

With all the failures of the project still fresh in my mind, it was easy to appreaciate how useful the book was. We could have used many of the concepts in the book in that project.

And here is the catch of this type of book: it is not appreciated until you go through a project wihtout it. Giving it to a college student as reading assignment will be a waste of time. It is more useful to the professional with some experience under the belt.

Unfortunately, it remains little read by professional programmers. It deserves a lot more attention and careful study.


Rating:
Summary: A must read book
Review: This is really one of the modern classics of computer science, and anything oo. You can get this info elsewhere now, since these ideas have spread so far and wide, but not all secondary sources really understand this stuff, so reading the source first hand is great. Sort of like the difference between reading Plato, or the cliff notes to Plato, and if you are doing any kind of object oriented design, you will discover that the analogy to Plato is not hyperbole at all.

Rating:
Summary: Good OLD Book. 2nd Edition ??
Review: This is defenetly the famous book on Design Patterns.
It'll be great, If the authors come up with
2nd edition. Following are the areas which can be improved upon:
1) simple and impressing examples
2) sample code in JAVA instead of C++

Rating:
Summary: OOP++
Review: It is assumed that almost any software developer or an architect has read or at least heard about this book. Your whole thinking and understanding of OOP will change after reading it. This book increments the usage of OOP at least by 1.

Rating:
Summary: Love it & Hate it
Review: If you are wondering what design patterns are.. well this book isn't for you, for now. Design patterns are cool, indispensable, useful ways to combine objects to build better OO programs. (Here better means basically more clear, extendable, maintanable, and elegant). Now, this is the book that started the design patterns "frenzy" and this is of course both good and bad, since in this frenzy some folks start to forget that good OOP ins't only about design and that design patterns are simple ways to combine object and not rocket science.
Anyhow... this book is not very good as an introduction to the subject, due to its dry and sometimes obscure style.
It is a very good read though for someone who has already read a more tutorial-like book (like "Design Patterns Explained" or the excellent "Thinking in Patterns" that you can download for free at Bruce Eckels's site) and wants to see them explained again from the "masters". This book
is extraordinarily useful and important, you cannot go without reading it if you are an OO programmer.. but still I wish that the style was simple and down to earth.
Most of the sample code is given in C++ but you don't need to be a C++ pro to read it. Some is in Smalltalk.. mmmm and that was definitely a bad idea .. but you can just skip it without losing anything.








Rating:
Summary: On a see-saw
Review: In reading this book I felt as though I were on a see-saw. Some concepts are described so clearly and succinctly (often an isolated paragraph or even just a sentence) that I felt I was really learning from the book. At other times, the examples were so academic and so far from useful in my day-to-day work, that I felt I was wasting my time.

I bought this book because you if you're serious about using patterns, you have to be able to say you've read and understood it, but ultimately there was much less practical information than I had expected.