Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture For Dummies

About This Book

This book provides proven architectures and designs expressed as patterns. These patterns aren't the only ways you can structure your software architecture, though, and this book doesn't replace the other references you use for software design patterns.

As you read this book, keep in mind that you can't just plug-and-play these patterns. Your intelligence and taste are required to adapt these patterns to your design problem. This is the norm with software patterns: No respectable pattern author will tell you that you can use his or her patterns without adapting them to your situation.

In the early days, software patterns provided valuable assistance to people who were trying to get a handle on object-oriented design. The discussions of these patterns seemed to me, however, to focus on getting the structure of the object-oriented program's header files and class definitions correct at the expense of the real application. In this book, I give you an understanding of the solutions to the problems, not the detailed header files. I want you to understand the principles involved rather than get caught up in the implementation details. As a result, this book isn't language-specific or programming paradigm-specific; instead, it explains the underlying principles involved in the solutions that you will apply using your prior experience and expertise.

Finally, you don't have to read the whole book from front cover to back. Instead, use the table of contents and index to locate ...