Review of ‘Design Patterns Explained’

TBR writes “To the uninitiated design patterns can appear to be some sort of mysterious secret language that is inaccessible to mere mortals. While the basic idea of reusing good design to solve frequently occurring problems is simple enough to grasp, the actual details seem to be couched in a form that makes them hard to contextualise and harder still to use in practice. If this is your experience then help may be at hand in the form of this useful little volume.

The aim of this book are simple – to make design patterns accessible and useful to the average developer. To this end the authors make a point of explaining both the history and background of the design patterns movement and also looking at the problems this movement set out to address in the world of object oriented development. This context is important because without it understanding of design patterns can be severely restricted. Knowing when and how to apply the patterns is more than half the battle.

Following this background material, along with a chapter that introduces UML, the book presents a real-world problem to tackle. The problem, how to extract information from a CAD/CAM system, is used both to illustrate the limitations of traditional object oriented design and to show how design patterns provide simpler and more elegant solutions.”