I purchased this book about a year ago and devoted a number of hours each week going through it. I am a software developer by trade, but never took a computer science course in my life, mostly because I was self-taught as a kid and all of this pre-dated the Web by about 20 years.
In any event, one area where I knew I was lacking was a formal understanding of design patterns. I was in the middle of a fairly large enterprise application, and while I was fully versed in Object Oriented Programming (and had even taught it in the past), I realized that everyone we were hiring out of college "spoke" a different language than I did, talking about singletons, factories, MVC, etc.
This book covers those and many, many more, in a completely involving and revolutionary way. It's basically designed with the Java language in mind, but I'm a .Net developer, never having learned Java. However, the book is so thorough and intuitive, that I decided to do all of the examples in C# (close enough to Java that in many cases, there's almost a 1-to-1 relationship between my home-grown example and the one in the book.
So for me, the book's benefit was two-fold: exposure to both design patterns and the Java language. In many cases, I was able to ".Net-ify" the examples to take advantage of specific features of .Net. A good example was in the Observer pattern where you have an object that changes over time, and other objects ("observers") need to be aware of this change. The book presents a language-agnostic approach, where the observable object registers all of its observers, and cycles through them notifying each one that it has changed. With .Net, it's much easier (and more appropriate) to implement this using events, where the observable object doesn't care who's watching, it just announces "I've changed!" and each observer can then decide how to handle that event.
But I digress... ultimately, I just threw myself into this book, doing every example as written, and then modifying those examples to function with the .Net mentality. I even did all the pencil exercises, puzzles, etc. It's all part of the learning process, right?
So, in a nutshell, if you need to learn design patterns, get this book. It's a lot of fun, and chock full of great information and examples that you'll be able to apply to your own projects right away.
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All images are squashed on the Kindle edition, affecting readability - get paper version instead
This is strictly a comment for the Kindle edition. I find the formatting of the pictures unreadable, and that this has a very negative impact on the usability of the book. IThe images, which are core to the text, are centered at 50% width of the page. This requires me to manually zoom in each time I want to see something clearly, a process which I find rather cumbersome to say the least.I've tested this both on a (high resolution) Samsung Galaxy S2 Tablet (Android Kindle; see screenshots) as well as my old Kindle DXG. Forget about seeing them on the OG Paperwhite.This issue is not unique to this book, however I do wish the authors would take the time to ensure their content is readable on the Kindle editions.
Top reviews from other countries
thebigcheese
Used sold as new
Reviewed in the Netherlands on May 18, 2024
thebigcheese
Reviewed in the Netherlands on May 18, 2024
Images in this review
akash
Very informative and creative book by design, its a design pattern in it self
Reviewed in India on September 18, 2019
