A New Perspective on Object Oriented Design - 2nd Edition (Software Patterns)

After reading two other books on design patterns, this one drove the concepts home. The author does a fine job explaining the material in a clear, well written manner. This book does not waste page after page of code listings found in many books trying to achieve a predetermined page count. However, the author could have provided some code on a CD or on the his web site. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone getting started with design patterns.

For any developer or architect, this book is a great reference guide for strong object-oriented programming design. The solutions described in this book are applicable for numerous business problems today, as they should be leveraged in enterprise applications.

I read this book with no design pattern knowledge, but any developer who has strong OO skills should be able to pick the concepts up quickly.

The author has really taken effort to explain hard concepts in understanding Design Patterns and he has done an excellent job at it. I would highly recommend this book as a good primer for the GoF book and for anyone who is interested in Design Patterns. I had originally bought the first edition and within the next couple of months the 2nd edition came up and bought that as well. I really feel that its worth the money.

You might also want to check the website for the book [...]

This book lays down foundations in object oriented design that are important to understand. Even more importantly it provides a foundation for the practice of object oriented design that is almost certain to result in systems that are extensible.

If you have struggled with understanding design patterns and their relevance in object oriented programming, this book should be a breath of fresh air.

OK, OK, granted that I spend my life around design patterns. But I expected a book with the title Design Patterns Explained to explain. Instead it seems to be soft and without many examples. I bought it with the hope that it would help my endeaver to finish a design patterns workbook but found no substance that I could gleam.
It also lacks a full coverage of the 23 design patterns in the GOF book.
Buy the book if you only want an overview, otherwise go through the pain of the GOF book Design Patterns, Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. It is cryptic and hard to grasp but the substance is there.

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

This book is an excellent introduction to Design patterns. Over the years I have tried to read the original book on the topic by Gamma et al. The effect has always been the same: fatigue! The authors of Design Patterns Explained deserves all respect for making DP understandable and I would recomend this book to anyone that wants to learn object oriented design.

The right book for a novice programmer to begin with design patterns. I had read the GOF book and had thought I understood design patterns until I read this book. After reading this book my understanding is much clearer.

I give it a 4 star rating because this book does not contain many other design patterns found in the GOF book. I hope a future revision will include them.

I like the way this book teaches the bridge pattern. I liked the first edition as a stop-gap. I had anticipated that the second edition would beef the book up in several areas - it didn't. My main problem with this book is that it doesn't stand the test of time. I do not find myself coming back to it.

This book serves more than an introduction to design patterns. It talks about how to use the lessons of patterns while doing analysis. It is very practical and easy to understand.

I highly recommend it for beginners to patterns and to anyone who wants to learn what it is about patterns that make them good.

The Gang of Four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides) wrote "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software," a definitive classic on object-oriented software design. GoF is often used as a shorthand name for this book. If the subject is at all applicable to your line of work or interest, then "Design Patterns" should be in your personal library.

I read many books about software analyse and design in Object Oriented but this book show me the right way easily. Alan Shalloway in this book show you a new way for analysis of problem domain and you find why and how using any design patterns in your design.

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.

Caveats: Although I have an MS in computer science this is my first book on design patters. Having said that...

The best thing about this book is the title.

I found the first edition of this book somewhat disapointing. It seemed to drag on terribly slowly in places. It seems that the authors relate much more to teaching and haven't quite hit their stride in writing on the same subjects. Interestingly, the most effective chapters were the shortest, those at the end of the first edition. They seemed to be little more than outlines hurridly gathered for press and they were the most concise and effective and not bogged down with tedious discussion.

The book's layout was also diapointing. Among other things I didn't care for the margin notes. They were distracting and there were far too many to be effective.

I'm looking forward to comparing other books on the subject.

May subsequent editions shed more light.

After getting halfway through the book, I found that there were no code exaples. Not compiling well is a much smaller issue, but just leaving them out makes this book worth half what I though it was as well as false advertising. I went to the books official discussion site and found that this had been notes as early as March 15. I've included the relevant post's from the discussion site.

TonyHa Posted 03-15-2005 05:29 AM
In the Second edition of the book, in the Preface page xxxi under paragraph Code examples. It say that for the code exampls please go to
[...] , but
when I goto this URL, the "Code Fragments" is grey out, there is no code framgments links.
[...]

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.

After going over this book I had this rhetoric question: `Why did the original need so much "explaining"?` Of course Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides is not a light reading and I had to go a couple of times (and still do) over certain aspects in order to get a good understanding. And still the substance and depth of the "original" are incomparable with present material. I admit, the book under review presentation is clear, but the concepts are fairly basic while the examples did not give me the most "natural" feeling.

I dont think you should go overboard crazy about design patterns. To me, knowing good Object Oriented design is what it is all about. With good OO design - patterns should follow naturally from the code.

Obviously, I see the value of patterns, where they create the possibility of creating a framework or headlines for talking about code. But when some people take patterns to be the solution to everything I am bit sceptical.

The book does a good job of explaining many of the patterns we know from the GOF text. And it is easier to read than the gang of four text. And there are also many nice chapters on good OO design.

So, All in all I should give this book 4 stars. But I am provoked by (all) pattern books that elevates patterns to be the eight wonder of the world - therefore I deduct two stars.

-Simon

Although I haven't read any other book on patters, I'll advise against this book. The organization and format of the book is not good. You can find better explanations online - try Wikipedia. Also, this book covers only 10 patters or so - much less than GoF.

If you're trying to learn about how Design Patterns work this is NOT the book to buy. When there were few books out on design patterns I could almost justify getting this book but now with so many books out there that explain what Knuth et al were getting at I couldn't recommend this book.