The Object-Oriented Thought Process

15. Design Patterns

One of the really interesting things about software development is that when you create a software system, you are actually modeling a real-world system. We have seen this concept throughout this book. For example, when we discussed using inheritance to abstract out the behaviors and attributes of mammals, the model was based on the true real-life model, not a contrived model that we created for our own purposes.

Thus, when we create a mammal class, we can use it to build countless other classes, such as dogs and cats and so on because all mammals share certain behaviors and attributes. This works when we study dogs, cats, squirrels, and other mammals because we can see patterns. These patterns allow us to inspect an animal ...