Solid concepts with liberal amounts of sugar to help it go down.

books:

	• Head First Design Patterns (Head First) Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, ... O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2004 - 676 pages average customer review:based on 250 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Solid concepts with liberal amounts of sugar to help it go down.

My first experience with a Head First book, and it is quite like a Dummies book (only for techies). That description doesn't really do the work justice, however. It is not just the concepts presented, nor is it the code examples they give (in Java). The clarity comes with the real-world examples where they lead you to a conclusion, then present the answer.

It is well thought out, and tons of fun to read. I would recommend it to ANY OO developer looking for a solid foundation to learn more about design patterns.

Bad practices encouraged

It encourages programmers to add retail products and product classifications by hardwiring them into code. This is not how it is done in practice nor should it be. In practice you have product tables (RDBMS) and product classification tables (many-to-many relationship with products). The code will then apply features based the product & classification table(s), but you do not directly create product taxonomies/classifications by typing them into the programming code itself. Designated users add to these tables (via edit screens), usually not the programmers themselves. If you were creating a Human Resources application, would you want to hardwire all the employees into the code? I've worked with multiple retail applications, and product classification was almost always table-driven so that one didn't have to call the programmer every time a new product or product grouping came in. You have to keep as much info about products as possible dynamic and user-tunable. I do have to give them credit for at least using practical examples. Too many other books use just shapes, animals, and device-driver examples.

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What a great book

Head First Design Patterns should be required reading for anyone wanting to do work in Actionscript 3.0. It's a very well written book that introduces programming from a conceptual framework. It's not as code heavy as other books, and that is a good thing. It's fairly easy to follow along even if you are using Actionscript and don't know a line of Java.

Great book

Analyses problems as a developer would do and then goes ahead solving it using patterns. So its easy to appreciate the design pattern in a practical way. Teaches you how to use patterns and to appreciate its use.
I am java developer and all examples and references are to Java.

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Cheesy design but excellent content

This book is written in a playful style and uses a lot of clip art and kooky fonts, and these put me off at first. But the book addresses a complex and difficult-to-understand subject, and it soon won me over. The examples are straightforward, and illustrate the patterns in a way that is easy to understand. The code examples are in Java but the concepts are easily applied to other languages (I am a Flash developer myself). The style might be cheesy at times, but it helped me learn the patterns in a direct and concrete way. Well done.

reviews: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, page 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

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