Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software,   ISBN:9780201633610

Customer Rating: 

As book it self states, this is a Catalog of Design Patterns with every pattern deeply analyzed and with the introductory chapter that explains why patterns are used. It sums the years of object oriented design experience. Even though the book is written in 1994 it's still relevant, though some newer languages implement some of the patterns as the language features. I didn't read any other books on the subject so I can't compare it anything, but this book is fantastic read and I am a better programmer now.

I should that I tried to read this book some years ago at the start of my university studies and didn't understand a thing. This time around it's all clear and I see it's practically useful.

Customer Rating: 

Design Patterns set out to identify the some of the most commonly used patterns and name them, so that they can be discussed easily. It does precisely that, and quite well. As long as you remember that it is not meant to be the definitive description of any patterns, and that variations and combinations on the patterns described are not only allowed but encouraged, it is a good reference. I would recommend that anyone interested in object-oriented design at least skim it, if for no other reason than to extract the vocabulary it introduced.

Customer Rating: 

This book reminds me why I hated school so much, despite my innate love for programming. It is bland, boring and outdated. If it had pictures in it, I would have drawn mustaches on all the people. There is nothing about the way this book is written that engages the reader and makes them want to read more. The examples are outdated, and don't directly apply to developers using modern languages like C#/Java. I mean using sub-classing for method callbacks is one such example, gimme a break. With that said, this book I'm sure was groundbreaking when it was written when a lot of this stuff was not well known. However, being a programmer of the modern age, most of these patterns are intrinsic and intuitive. Most of these patterns I've used throughout my career, I just didn't know what they were formally called. So, if you want a book that puts a name with the common patterns you normally use day to day, by boring you to death in the process, then this is the book for you. If you are a teacher and want to fail your whole class and discourage them from pursuing CS as a major, then this is definitely the book for you.

Customer Rating: 

This book is just "OK" for me but that's only due to the fact that I don't know SmallTalk or C++. I was able to follow the descriptions of how the design patterns work, but that's because I already read the Head First Design Patterns book, which for me was a much better instruction on Design Patterns.

This book is probably very informative to someone who has a Computer Science background, but for the relatively moderate programmer and someone who doesn't know the particular languages the book covers, it may not be valuable.

Side note: the authors are the "Gang Of Four" who are famous for Design Patterns designs and their web site, [...] is a good resource for patterns in other languages. I'm a C# developer and they have a package available with examples of all the designs patterns that I've found invaluable.

Customer Rating: 

First let me start with the good points about this book.
This book absolutely rocks in terms of ways in which you can write a beautiful piece of code. The authors have picked up the best recipes which are time tested to create a book which should help everyone from a beginner to an expert. The book has been written for C++ programmers and requires some amount of experience in object oriented programming (hence java and c# programmers are fine too).

The bad points are:
It's old. The current and only edition came out in 1997. A second edition is long overdue. A lot has changed in the software methodologies since then. JAVA already incorporates a lot of things that are mentioned in this book. An example in point is the iterator pattern. Hence, a better book for JAVA programmers would be JAVA Design Patterns Explained or Head First Design Patterns.

Still a pretty great book...