Holub on Patterns: Learning Design Patterns by Looking at Code

Normally a book of this sort would start with a quote from Christopher Alexander, the architect (of buildings) who came up with the notion of a design pattern. I’ve found that though Alexander is a brilliant man who writes wonderful books, his prose can be a bit opaque at times, so I’ll skip the mandatory quote. His ideas launched the entire design-pattern movement, however.

Similarly, the seminal book on design patterns in software is Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides’s Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley, 1995). (The four authors are jokingly called the Gang of Four by most working designers.) My ...