Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic! Teaches people the meaning of patterns.
Review: This is a very easy book to read. It offers the reader a gentle and easy introduction to Design Patterns and Object Oriented Programming. This makes the book extremely effective. Unlike the GoF book, everyone I have shared it with has actually read and understood the material. This is a good thing, since they now have the understanding and confidence to work through the GoF book. Which is very important. The GoF book was the most important book on software development in the 1990's. This book will open your mind. Buy it and read it today!
Rating:
Summary: if you're not a design patterns expert, this one's for you
Review: ... This book is not intended for design pattern experts. Mr. Shalloway and Mr. Trott makes that very clear. It _is_ intended for any of us who had difficulties reading the Gang of Four book (actually, I suspect many people who think they understand design patterns would benefit from this book as well). I will review this book for what it is intended - an excellent introduction to design patterns. Chapters 1 and 2 are clearly there to help those of us with minimal object-oriented design backgrounds. I consider this a value to the book and not a reason to discount its rating (just skip the chapter if you know this stuff already :) It explains the perspective from which the developers who designed the patterns in the Gang of Four's book must have been viewing. Any of us who wondered why the Gang of Four told us to "design to interfaces" (actually, that one I understood), "encapsulate what varies" or "favor object composition over class inheritance" will get a lot out of this book. For example:
1) designing to interfaces allows us to hide implementations
2) encapsulation is not just data-hiding, but class hiding when polymorphism is used
3) inheritance should be thought of as a way to classify, not specialize - we get reuse by containing previously developed objects
4) using object composition when possible instead of inheritance allows us to avoid large class hierarchies that are difficult to maintain In other words, we come away not just knowing the patterns, but getting a lot of insights into why they work. Insights we can use on our own later (even when we can't identify patterns being present). I know a lot of people who actually know patterns, but use them individually to solve particular problems. This book gives insights that I believe would help even these individuals. That is because it is as much about how to design as it is about what patterns are. My recommendation, read this book if you want to design better.
Rating: 
Summary: Only for Beginners
Review: It's a nice book but... As one reviewer mentioned "Chapter 1 and 2 are of little value to experienced OO developers". Let me say it stronger - the whole book is for OO/DesignPatterns beginners. It really adds some new comments explaining well-known patterns but if you read GoF book and implemented some of those patterns you hardly discover something new. Indeed there is some fresh interpretation of Alexander book but for developer all this boils down eventually to a couple of principles and a dozen of patterns (may be I'm wrong). To sum up: if you are new to Design Patterns ideas then it's an excellent introduction, however otherwise look for something more advanced.
Rating:
Summary: Convinces also a sceptical about Design Patterns
Review: We all suppose that Design Patterns are usefull - each guru is talking about them. However, they look so abstract... Here's a book written from a developers point, getting into a mess with his traditional approach, looking for a better solution and step-by-step he's explaining why and how to use Design Patterns. Excellent
Rating:
Summary: Hand holding for those without Computer Science PhD's
Review: epiphany - (1)a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something. (3) : an illuminating discovery b : a revealing scene or moment. The authors have written a book unlike all other design patterns books in that it fully enlightens the reader to how design patterns really work together to produce stable and robust applications. Reading other patterns books compares to looking up words in a dictionary. Reading Design Patterns Explained compares to having a famous author teach you how to think about words and how fit them together into elegant prose. If you find other design patterns books to be difficult reading, then this is the book for you. The book is an easy read that will enlighten you to such an extent that you will be able to peruse other patterns books with relative ease. I cannot say enough good things about the book. I only wish that it had been written five years ago.
Rating: 
Summary: A shift in thought process
Review: This book is valuable in that it gives you new ways to approach object oriented design using design patterns. The authors derivation of the Bridge Pattern in chapter 9 was the most enlightening chapter in the book. Part III and Part IV are the best sections of the book. Part V is a little rushed especially with the last few patterns that seem to have been thrown in without much exposition. Chapter 1 and 2 are of little value to experienced OO developers; however, this seems intentional. They mention using design patterns to teach OO design so these terms are necessary. The good news is that you don't need a lot of OO experience for this book to be accessible. The main reason I hold back 5 stars is the short comings of Part V. If the patterns in this section were given the same detail as those in Part III, this would definitely be a 5 star book.
Rating:
Summary: Worth 6 stars
Review: A superb little book that should become a pre-requisite to reading the GOF Design Patterns classic. Unlike other books that simply restate the GOF patterns in UML & Java this book goes to great lengths to use plain English to really make a great job of explaining the patterns covered. The title somewhat undersells the content of the book. This book really gives a very solid introduction to pattern-based-design. Of all the elements the authors incoporate I particularly enjoy their restatement of Alexandrian pronciples. Buy a copy for yourself now. If you are a supervisor also buy a copy for every developer you supervise. If you are a college lecturer buy a copy for every student in your class.
Rating:
Summary: THE Introduction to Design Patterns
Review: This sparkling little introduction to design patterns is clear, well-organized, and supplied with sufficient sample code to help you understand and use 14 of the most important design patterns. Best of all, the authors provide insight into how using design patterns meshes with best practices in object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD). They explain the shortcomings of traditional OOAD by supplying an example of a brittle, overly complex design that they themselves had crafted. They identify the culprit as overreliance on specialization. The authors then discuss 14 of the most important patterns from the Gang Of Four book, and how using them made their own design more elegant. Along the way, they elucidate several themes you need to know in order to use design patterns: * Encapsulation can hide more than data. It can hide complexity (the Facade pattern) or an ill-suited interface (the Adapter pattern), for example. * Find what is common and make it an interface; find what varies, and encapsulate it. * Don't get lost by plunging into the details of implementation too early; instead, use design patterns to address your problem space at a conceptual level. As suits an introductory work, the authors do not deal with all the design patterns from the Gang Of Four, and not with the same depth. Fortunately, they supply ample footnotes to provide further reading for those of us who want more depth. Bottom Line: You know that if you just turn nouns in your problem space into objects and verbs into methods, you won't magically get a sound design. On the other hand, it is easy to get lost in the complexity of Gamma's classic. Resolve the dilemma by reading this book first! Footnote: as I feel that the vast majority of potential readers will not have the opportunity to attend Shalloway's 2-day course, I will not use the fact that it duplicates much of the book's content as a reason to lower my rating. It's a 5-star work all the way.
Rating:
Summary: Very easy to read patterns book
Review: Very easy to read/understand description of patterns. The real world examples go long way in understanding patterns and how they are applied. The code in this book is not complete. (Have not checked if there is any more code available on the authors web site) The reason I gave it only three stars is because... I had an opportunity to take the design patterns course from one of the authors of the book. And I was disappointed to see the book material "exactly identical" to the course notes.
Rating:
Summary: Opened my eyes to the full potential of patterns
Review: I've been coding for 10 years. I only use object oriented languages (C++, Java or C#). I have read the classic Design Patterns by Erich Gamma etc.. It is a wonderful reference and primer for design patters. However, Design Patterns Explained takes the foundation laid by Gamma and show you how to practically apply it to code. The keyword I would give this book is practical. The ideas presented revolutionized the way I code. Everytime I find myself copy and pasting logic I think back to what this book taught me and I find a way to abstract/generalize the logic so that I only have one copy of it. This pays tremendous dividends in development time and maintanance. Now that Java and C# are adding templates I will be able to do even more.
My only caveat is that this book is not for beginners. If you don't know how to program or you haven't programmed for long this book will fly right over your head.
| 
