Rating: 
Summary: Best book to bridge gap between OOD & Patterns
Review: This is a really great book. By integrating OOD with Patterns you learn both better, faster, and more completely and intuitively. I never really felt I grasped patterns well until I read this book - and it has made me a better OO designer at the same time.
Rating: 
Summary: I'm returning this book
Review: I bought this book based on its rating. Unfortunately, virtually every page of this book is half blank. Furthermore, there are many unnecessary blank lines within the text page. The format of this book is like for third grade. Also, the author uses Java code along with his text. But at the end of each chapter, he uses C++ code as a duplication of the Java code.
If you want to know and learn Design Patterns, make sure you look at "Software Architecture Design Patterns in Java" by Partha Kuchana. This book covers 42 design patterns including the 23 GoF patterns. Also, you might like to look at "Core J2EE Patterns" Second Edition by Alur, Crupi, amd Malks.
Rating:
Summary: Invaluable book for Beginners in OO Programming
Review: This is an excellent book for beginners in OO programming to understand Design Patterns and in the process to learn and reinforce the Object Oriented programming principles. To understand the GoF patterns book, you need good grasp of Object Oriented principles. This book gives you good grasp of OO principles by explaining the Design Patters. It uses many definitions from the GoF book and has many references to it.
The flow of topics is excellent.
It starts with simple object oriented principles, a design problem which authors faced, solution to that problem in traditional OO approach, then went on to explain 4 of the important and useful design patterns, now again back to design problem and solving it by applying these 4 design patters, then in the context of that design problem explains much broader meaning of the basic OO principles(Abstraction, Inheritance, Encapsulation, Polymorphism and Objects) and then went on to give some excellent advice on approaching the Design and explains 6 more design patterns.
Though i worked with OO languages like java, cocoa(Objective-C) for 3 yrs, i never understood the basic OO principles until I read this book.
Even for reading the GoF patterns, this book may be a good starting point.
Rating:
Summary: Great for all the right reasons
Review: All the reviews raving this book are correct.
Rating:
Summary: Start here!
Review: I was unable to penetrate Gamma et al before reading this book and was able to make use of Gamma et al after reading the book. Reading this book was a major breakthrough in my capacity as an object oriented programmer.Clear and insightful, easy to read yet precise. If you understand the nuts and bolts of an OO language but feel you aren't quite "getting it" this book may very well get you over the hump. Very highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book To Introduce Yourself To Real OO Design
Review: As .NET is becoming more and more popular, alot of coders are going from classical VB to a Object-Oriented framework. And alot of them are lost or only understand classes as "modules" instead of seeing them as "objects". This book will open alot of minds to the true power of OO in a "easy-read" format.
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