Head First Design Patterns

This book has taught me design patterns from the very beginning.It caters fundamentals of designing applications (in addition to explaining design patterns) which most design patterns book fail to do.
This book will help you learn design concepts from scratch,though this book cannot be used as a catalogue of design patterns. Once this book is covered, a catalogue can be referred to for implementing design patterns.
One notable feature of this book is it explains how to modify and fit a particular design pattern for your requirements

I was completely intrigued with the way this book has been written.Awesome work by the authors.Thanks to them for writing such a book on design patterns

Unlike a lot of people, I don't care much for this book's 'irreverent' sytle. I think it masks some shortcoming in the examples it uses. But once you get past that, this is still the best introduction to object-oriented programming that I have read.

HFDP is not just about design patterns. It's a great introduction to object-oriented programming. The book does a great job of explaining the benefits of OOP over traditional procedural programming, and it explains OOP very well in terms of the most commonly used design patterns.

Now for the bad news. The examples are rather lightweight. They do a pretty good job of illustrating the concepts presented, but the code is in no way real-world. For example, if you are looking for which pattern to use to organize a UI (the 'Mediator', 'State', and 'Composite' patterns), with sample code, you won't find it here. The patterns are discussed, but they are used to create quacking ducks (really).

While that's by-and-large a shortcoming of the book, the code is so simple that non-Java programmers (like me) should have no problem using the book. The code samples are very basic, and should translate with little difficulty into .NET languages such as C# and VB.

One other item of note--this book contains a pretty good chapter on Model-View-Controller architecture, which seems to bedevil a lot of people. If you can get a handle on MVC, then you can pretty much do OOP.

In short, this is probably the book I would recommend as an intro to OOP. If you are under the age of 30, you will probably like the examples of quacking duck simulators and java-enabled gumball machines. For everybody else--it's worth looking past this book's insufferable cuteness if you are getting started in OOP.

If this book needs to be cashed in fully, one should:
(i)Have the skill to represent OO models using UML
(ii)Have good working knowledge of an OO language (Java, C etc)
(iii)Have insights to inheritance, aggregation, composition and general polymorphic behaviour
(iv)Have prior experience in confronting applications that need deep/incisive code changes for small changes in fuctionality.

In spite of the casual approach to presenting the essence of the patterns, this book is not for beginners. In fact OO design itself is not for beginners. Occasionally I have felt the need to re-read the synopsis section of a given pattern from GoF's book before coming back to HFDP.

One suggestion for the publisher/author: The code sections have been presented in large fonts that give a cluttered look to any given chapter. And the code is not always well indented or unnecessarily indented. Courier(8 pt) or Courier New(9 pt) or similar should be used to present the code sections - nothing bigger than these. And the code should have proper line breaks to give a clean look - rather than relying on word wrapping.

This book presents the design patterns in such a beautiful way that the concepts sits at the back of your mind. It ignites the need of design patterns in your day-to-day work.

It's a true story that I read about something called "Observer pattern" and a month later I suggested a new feature in the product I am working on at IBM. Currently I am involved in its development - thanks to this book.

I appreciated the true use of UML diagrams in the book. Every design pattern is explained with the help of UML diagrams wherever necessary. Along with design patterns, now I understand UML paradigm in a much better way.

Whenever I have to develop a new feature, I don't try to think about the solution to the problem - I think how to break down the problem so that it can be solved by a couple of design patterns ;) ... may be I have found a way to be more lazy or may be more smart!

recommend ;

I had ordered this book since I liked this book after reading the same from my company Library. Unfortunately its print quality is bad when compared to the edition I have here in my company library (July 2007 for sale in Indian Subcontinent etc).
The edition that I have is the same version(October 2011 Edition Reprint for sale in Indian Subcontinent) but the latest reprint.
Unfortunately this reprint is pretty bad compared to the 2007.
Both are grayscale printing but somehow the one I got is more like back and white. Either this book is not original or the publishers have degraded it.

Ofcourse if your reading this book for the first time, then you may not feel an difference.

As usual, Flipkart Service is real good and prompt!
Keep up the good work!