Customer Reviews

The Pattern Almanac 2000

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

When this book is described as a listing of 700+ patterns, think literally. No UML, no suggested implementation, no rationale, no CRC - just a brief description of the pattern. And I do mean brief; the GoF's Mediator is reduced to six or seven lines. If you're looking for a good book on patterns, go elsewhere. If you're looking for a good index to pattern material you may already have (JOOP, GoF, Smalltalk Patterns, PLoP books, PLoP conferences, and others) this may be a worthwhile investment as the book includes excellent citation sections.

This is the book that the pattern community has been waiting for! The one source of pointers and intents for all the patterns that have been published about software and selected other topics. In order to locate a pattern, or even know it existed before this book you would have had to have studied all the various pattern books and websites, ranging from the Gang of Four (Gamma, Helm, Johnson & Vlissides) to the latest PLoP proceedings. This book makes it possible to identify a problem that you have (such as dealing with queues), turn to the index to look up that topic (12 different patterns related to queues are indexed, as well as citations of several collections of patterns), and then turn to the cited pages to determine if the patterns might be useful to you in solving your current problem.

The value of this book is not that it restates all the patterns, it is in its ability to index the patterns so that they can be found. I think it does an admirable job of this. To achieve this Linda Rising has tackled the monumental job of documenting the intents of all these patterns. For those patterns that I'm familiar with she's done a great job capturing the intent.

This book won't make the reader an expert on the use of any pattern, but will contribute to their ability to create better software.

Considering that one of the hard parts of applying patterns is finding initially the right one for the problem at hand, this is an excellent catalog to support one in this task. Certainly, it's not a book to start learning about patterns. But after one has done the required homework (reading the GoF and POSA book) it's an excellent place to start hunting for additional patterns. I especially love the multiple indices.

I missed two things. I would have liked to see a better context desciption for each pattern and I missed a few patterns that I consider useful. Among those are the recently published "SanFrancisco Design Patterns", although Pattern purists may possibly argue whether the latter already qualify as patterns by the "rule of three".

In any case, a very good (4 1/2 stars) addition to ones desktop!

Somewhere along the line, AWL decided to release the GOF book as a CD, entitled "Design Patterns CD". I personally found the cross-linking of patterns via hypertext to be extremely valuable, and "The Pattern Almanac 2000" cries out for the same treatment. Frequently while reading/scanning this text I found myself wishing that each pattern was linked to its on-line source (where available), or that I could connect to related patterns or documents regarding experience with their use.

This book is, as others have pointed out, an index. Having this in softcopy would provide another dimension of use that would markedly increase its value.

Patterns. The current vocabulary of the high end designers and software architects. There are very few universities offering the M.S. courses on this subject; the future language of the software industry. Eric Gamma et al. started this revolution in 1995. It seems that there is no end to it.

The author herself has significant experience in the area of Patterns. The book, as its name suggests, is indeed a very good almanac of patterns.

The author has taken truly a lot of pains to collect patterns from varous industries & put them in book form. Many of the patterns I have not heard of. That is one of the greatest strengths of the book; it gives you a bird's eye view of all the patterns used in various industries.

Another thing I liked about the book, the author mentions relationships with other patterns, though not with details.

The layout of the book was not as appealing & the index takes many pages. The patterns should have been accompained by urls. Some url's are given. But, not all. But the effort is really herculean & the author has done a great job to put it in book form.

Please note that the book is not for beginners. It is for users who know & use patterns & want to know more about other patterns. I hope the author will come up with more patterns in the near future.

As a body of literature expands, it reaches the point where collections of detailed explanations become too large and unwieldy to be examined efficiently. When this occurs, it is very helpful for people to collect and organize the descriptions of the features, so that practitioners can quickly look up the general descriptions. That is what Linda Rising has done with software patterns.
Each pattern entry in the almanac has the basic information:

* Pattern name
* Category list of where it is used
* Source citation
* URL if applicable
* What it is designed to do
* Related patterns
* An experience report citation if applicable

Most of the descriptions take up less than a third of a page, so the author has erred on the side of brevity. This was the proper approach, as this is a reference book of brief explanations designed to serve as a primer and a collection of pointers to more detailed information.
The good, brief descriptions aside, the real quality of books of this type is measured by the ease of discovery when you conduct a search. The different levels of indexing and the ease with which you can understand them is where one book rises above another. The opening list organizes the patterns alphabetically according to category, the index at the end is approximately one-third of the book and nineteen pages of bibliography are included in the middle. That makes it easy to find a pattern, whether you know it by name or by usage.
This is a reference book that you will make use of if you are serious about applying the advantages that software patterns can provide. Neat and well organized, you should be able to find any of the patterns in a matter of seconds, even with minimum knowledge.

The Almanac is an indispensable tool for the pattern professional. I use it daily in my capacity as a consultant. It's great when I can remember the existence of a pattern, but not quite the name. The Almanac has just enough information for me to recall the essence of the patterns. It's well organized and concise. The only place I can find "all the patterns" in one place.

Having worked my way through a good proportion of the famous 'Design Patterns' book I'm always on the lookout for a simpler introductory book that I can recommend to people new to the subject. In many ways this book fulfills that rôle.

It is a comprehensive catalogue of pretty much every important pattern published. It includes lots of reference material and a wealth of information on where to find more information. Its weakness is that it includes so many patterns. There is quite a lot of duplication (or, alternatively, variations on a theme) and the quest to include everything means that there is only a limited amount of information about any particular pattern. Additionally, there seems to be little discrimination between what I would describe as 'important patterns' (such as Factories or Composites) and trivial ones (such as the oft quoted 'George Washington is dead').

Patterns were first developed by people working in the language smalltalk. They have since outgrown their origins but seem reluctant to let go. As a result you'll find a disproportionate number of examples worked out in that language. Although not insurmountable, it is still a barrier that will hinder the majority of programmers. Fewer examples are also worked out in other, more common, languages such as Java and C++. Since no single language is right for all programmers, I'd have liked to have seen more emphasis on the UML diagrams.

Overall, this is a useful reference work to have available in the office though not an essential one for your bookshelf.

This is nothing more than a shopping list of patterns. No real content, nothing to learn, just a catalog of patterns. The patterns are not even explained to any degree.

Many other good pattern books. Click Search...

I should probably have read the previous reviews more carefully before buying this book... It was not what I was looking for. If you have a wealth of patterns-related material, it may probably be a good addition, providing an extensive index (or more precisely multiple cross-indexes) to patterns and patterns-related publications and resources. But really don't expect to LEARN anything from this book... The 1 to 3 sentences describing each entry are just too short and lack the uniformity of some common representation or formalism. So the index is rich, but don't expect to buy anything else than an index.