Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)

Overall a good book. In my opinion it is better suited to be a textbook for a software engineering course than a 'self help' kind of book. Can be a bit too theoretical for my taste, but it is an interesting read.

This book doesn't contain any Java hacks or UML 2.0 up to date notations, it contains the core concepts of software design patterns. The 23 GoF Patterns are described by their four inventors. A must have for software engineers.

unlike the last pattern book i reviewed (see my other reviews), this one has an attractive cover. i like blue.

Most of the books I have read about object oriented programming were about some specific language and failed to provide a more general way to think about solving problems without writing a lot of code. This book was a missing link for me and I wish I had read it sooner. The authors provide you with elegant ways to use object oriented language features to simplify your programming solutions.

When the specs on your project change and you have to re-factor your code, you may be able to use a design pattern from this book to simplify your solution and make your design more flexible with regard to the parts of the spec that are changing quickly.

This is a great book on design patterns. Not only does it cover the theory of what each pattern is and it's respective use. It also gives very concrete examples of the proper use of each pattern in C++. I highly reccomend this to any serious programmer.