Books : Head First Design Patterns (Head First)

Rating: - Very clear
Excellent book - very clear in putting the concepts across. Gradually builds towards understanding. Some repetition - but it works by re-enforcing the concepts. It's not often I read a technical book cover-to-cover.

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Rating: - from fog to crystal
no pretentious use of jargon
clear and precise clarifications of OO as well as of patterns.

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Rating: - Best book on my bookshelf
If you want a reference manual, a pattern catalogue, that you refer to once you are an expert in the field then the GoF book is the one. If you want to LEARN a number of the most common design patterns then this is the ONLY book to start with. This is the best software development text I have on my shelf. Being a J2EE developer for a large bank I tend to have a lot :).

I remember first looking at the format of these books and thinking great, more books full of fluff, dumbing down for the ipod generation. It's not the right format for a reference manual but it seems effective to get a first grasp on the material. Books written in a more abstract, formal manner cause cognitive overload and resulting in an inability to read a large portion of the book without the brain totally freezing. This book is compelling from start to end and can be read in a weekend without frying your brain.

It's pretty amazing that for a book that, at first glance, seems to be full of frivolous items not necessarily related to the content it delivers a lot of information very concisely. It's the gift of a telented teacher to delivery knowledge in a consise manner and shows how deeply they understand there subject.

Having just finished the book over the weekend I felt compelled to come to amazon in the early hours of the morning to write this review because it's a superb book and I'd certainly like to see the authors rewarded for their efforts.

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Rating: - Java with wings ... ?
This is such a brilliant book. I struggle to go beyond that simple statement. Why is it brilliant ?
It communicates incredibly powerful (sometimes almost sublime) approaches to solving common problems within real-world constraints (!). Yes, all the example *source code* is Java, but the surrounding text, explanations, diagrams, crosswords, exercises, are not. The sample Java code does not use any obscure fancy tricks. Every example could be easily translated to Objective C/Cocoa, C++, C#. So don't think of it as a Java book, its so much more than that.

When I read the first chapter of this book I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck starting to stand up as the depth of what I was understanding sunk in. If you've experienced that moment of the penny dropping, well many pennies drop per chapter with this book. By the end of the 1st chapter I was in awe of this book.

Of course it depends as always what you are looking for, but for me this is quite simply a book that opens certain doors wide open that might have always remained shut. It does this with a full set of working code examples for each chapter so you can experiment applying the patterns as presented.

Why not 5 stars ? I think that this is a superb book to learn the principles from, but it is not the de facto reference, so I will need to buy something beyond this book to fulfill that need (GoF *). 4.5 stars really.

* GoF - Gang of Four - "Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software" by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides

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Rating: - Understanable
This book explains clearly how and when to apply design patterns. Its not over complicated or cluttered with UML diagrams. Really impressed with this.