Just like the title says - Design Patterns Explained
In my humble opinion, I think this should be the first design pattern book to read for beginners. The GoF book can be a bit overwhelming for the newbie.
The book is well written and easy to follow. The coverage of each pattern is short and the explanation is straight forward. The diagrams and side-notes help to illustrate what is going on. After reading this book, you should be ready to tackle the GoF book.
Good book on Object Oriented design principles
I have seen developer who knows quite a number of design patterns, but still produce terrible design, because they don't know when and where to apply.
If you want to increase your number on design patterns, this is the wrong book for you. If you want to learn the design principles behind most of the design patterns, such as open-closed principle, single responsibility principle and favor aggregation over inheritance principle, this is a must-read.
Textbook
It's a textbook.
I needed it for a class.
Your mileage may vary.
Insights into using patterns
This book gives an excellent insight into using some of the patters described in the classic book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series). It explains the reasons why particular patterns are useful and how they can be implemented to solve real-world problems.
Truly a new perspective on an old topic
IMHO, if you ever wanted to understand Design Patterns and most of the basic OO concepts way much better than you do now, then this is the book. It is well written, easy to read, and the authors convey the information very well. They even stick to the same real-world examples throughout the book while explaining the various concepts and patterns. This book treats the GoF Design Patterns book like the catalog that it should be with lots of references into it.
I randomly decided to bring it along on my recent business trip. I found the book engaging and have studied (not just scanned) almost half of it now. I found it to answer so many questions I had about OO all these years. It provides a strong foundation into thinking about design, OO, and patterns. I highly recommend it. The book's subtitle states, "A new perspective on OO design" and I totally agree with the authors. So far I have covered the Adaptor, Façade, Bridge, and Strategy patterns. They are highly useful and very powerful patterns that allow for easy communication among the designers, the implementers, and the unit testers.
For experienced software engineers, you may find this just a concise repackaging of what you already know and have learned. But you too may still find some new golden nuggets here and there within these pages. Plus, I believe you may find this new perspective enlightening as to why you use design patterns not just how or the pattern as a cookie cutter.
To address all the other prior reviews (especially those with low ratings), this book is in fact a new perspective. If you miss that point then this book will look like just another rehash of the topic of design patterns. But if you really study it and look for and understand this new perspective, you will find it very useful. The authors are trying to have you see design patterns as much more than just a common diagram. It is a better way to conceive of designs and communicate them, with much more understanding behind them. Design patterns are like any other tool; you may understand what a hammer and nail is for, but you may not know all the proper techniques in using a hammer and nail, and therefore your final product will be reasonable but not the best. This book goes a long way to achieving the best.
