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Head First Design Patterns (Head First) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)
by Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra
| Category:
Java language, Software development, IT, Technology |
| Market price: ¥ 448.00
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¥ 418.00
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Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Written in a typically Head First refreshing style, this is one of the easiest to read and absorb among the major reference sources for design patterns. |
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Author: Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Pub. in: October, 2004
ISBN: 0596007124
Pages: 638
Measurements: 9.3 x 8 x 1.4 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00538
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- Awards & Credential -
An Amazon.com top 1,500 bestselling book (ranked # 1,030 in the middle November, 2006) |
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- MSL Picks -
If your previous attempts to learn design patterns have induced bouts of narcolepsy, Head First has a better idea. Using their now familiar and very effective teaching style, the design patterns are presented with fun and humor. Off-beat coding examples in Java are used to illustrate the problems that the patterns are to solve and the pattern-influenced solutions. For those of us who are micro-confined, the C# version is available from the website.
Rather than teach just the design patterns, the underlying object-oriented principles are taught, for example "Favor composition over inheritance". Not only does this reinforce the understanding of the pattern, but also it better enables the developer to apply the pattern appropriately. Emphasis is also placed in understanding the differences between similar patterns or patterns that support similar principles.
The depth of coverage that the book delivers requires that the focus is on the most frequently used patterns with the rest of the GOF patterns being briefly mentioned in the appendix.
When I first saw the book, I was curious about how this would work out. After all, everything that I had seen on design patterns had not been the least bit amusing, but not to fear the Head First team has created a real gem. Maybe the Head First crew could tackle UML or Test Driven Development for us and make them fun to learn, also. We can only hope.
Hope you'll find the Table of Contents below helpful:
1. Welcome To Design Patterns
2. The Observer Pattern
3. The Decorator Pattern
4. Factory Pattern
5. Singleton Pattern
6. Command Pattern
7. Adapter and Facade Patterns
8. Template Method Pattern
9. Iterator and Composite Patterns
10. State Pattern
11. Proxy Pattern
12. Compound Pattern
13. Patterns in the Real World
14. Leftover Patterns
(From quoting C. Lowry, USA)
Target readers:
Java programmers, Computer Science majors, People interested in learning Java.
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Kathy Sierra was lead developer for the SCJP for Java 5. Sierra worked as a Sun "master trainer," and in 1997, founded javaranch.com, the largest Java community website. Her books have won multiple Software Development Magazine awards, and she is a founding member of Sun's Java Champions program.
Bert Bates was a lead developer for several of Sun's Java certifications including the SCJP for Java 5. He is also a forum moderator on javaranch.com, a 20-year software developer veteran, and co-author of several bestselling Java books. Bert is is a founding member of Sun's Java Champions program.
Eric Freeman is co-founder and CTO of Mirror Worlds Technologies,a Java and Jini-based software company. Dr Freeman previously worked at Yale University on space-based systems, and is a Fellow at Yale's Center for Internet Studies.
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From the Publisher:
You're not alone. At any given moment, somewhere in the world someone struggles with the same software design problems you have. You know you don't want to reinvent the wheel (or worse, a flat tire), so you look to Design Patterns - the lessons learned by those who've faced the same problems. With Design Patterns, you get to take advantage of the best practices and experience of others, so that you can spend your time on...something else. Something more challenging. Something more complex. Something more fun. You want to learn about the patterns that matter - why to use them, when to use them, how to use them (and when NOT to use them). But you don't just want to see how patterns look in a book, you want to know how they look "in the wild". In their native environment. In other words, in real world applications. You also want to learn how patterns are used in the Java API, and how to exploit Java's built-in pattern support in your own code. You want to learn the real OO design principles and why everything your boss told you about inheri- tance might be wrong (and what to do instead). You want to learn how those principles will help the next time you're up a creek without a design paddle pattern. Most importantly, you want to learn the "secret language" of Design Patterns so that you can hold your own with your co-worker (and impress cocktail party guests) when he casually mentions his stunningly clever use of Command, Facade, Proxy, and Factory in between sips of a martini. You'll easily counter with your deep understanding of why Singleton isn't as simple as it sounds, how the Factory is so often misunderstood, or on the real relationship between Decorator, Facade and Adapter. With Head First Design Patterns, you'll avoid the embarrassment of thinking Decorator is something from the "Trading Spaces" show. Best of all, in a way that won't put you to sleep! We think your time is too important (and too short) to spend it struggling with academic texts. If you've read a Head First book, you know what to expect - a visually-rich format designed for the way your brain works. Using the latest research in neurobiology, cognitive science, and learning theory, Head First Design Patterns will load patterns into your brain in a way that sticks. In a way that lets you put them to work immediately. In a way that makes you better at solving software design problems, and better at speaking the language of patterns with others on your team.
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| View all 15 comments |
An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
This book is one of the best books on Patterns. I recommend everyone interested in improving their design skill to read it. The authors did a great job making the book very informative and at the same time funny and easy to read. You are pretty much guaranteed to start writing better code after reading this book. |
Slavisa (MSL quote), Serbia
<2007-01-10 00:00>
Soon after the Gang of Four published their book about basics of Design Patterns, I bought the book and read it very carefully. About that time I was busy doing other engineering work so I could not put the patterns in immediate use in some practical project. Maybe that contributed to my troubles understanding it.
While reading the GoF book I found it very complicated to memorize the pattern. After reading so many books on programming, so many technical and other books every year in several decades in the past, I thought I have a very strong and sound learning techniques from books. But GoF book simply was out of my reach from some reason. The problem was this: when reading about a pattern, I could understand every sentence, every paragraph, and most of the time the whole chapter about that particular pattern; but it seemed hard to keep in mind that pattern, and soon afterwards, I could hardly implement the pattern in my programs. It was as if you are keeping the slippery fish in your hands, and just when you think you caught it, it slips from your hands back into the water.
Finally after this book (it is still in reading) I found what I was searching for:
1) the crystal sound explanation of Design Patterns – why you use any of them;
2) what is important and what is not important in pattern. Actually the authors of HeadFirst does not speak much about it explicitly, but when they explain the pattern you do not have to think what I was constantly thinking when reading GoF book: what is the most important part of the pattern and which part of pattern can be changed for specific use. With HeadFirst book you get the right measure of all parts of pattern explanation.
3) I could memorize, reproduce and implement the patterns with ease!
Second, the book is astonishingly new, refreshing and perfect in the presentation sense. It is full of pictures and with hand-written comments. Everybody who was ever involved in the presentation material would tell how hard is to achieve such a great presentation level with so many diverse visual effects and putting them in perfect shape like this book achieves. I think this was the problem for one of the very rare reviewers of this book to give this beautiful book such a bad grade. I think he was wrong to falling under the first-impression opinion and misjudged the book greatly.
The truth is the Head First Design Patterns deserves the highest possible marks – I do not give it only 5 stars, but I give it the Oscar for Design Patterns. And that is final even before I read the last page of it. Authors of this book, if you ever read this comment here is the message for you: my sincere complements for your hard work, you has been terrifically good, and I mean it! |
An Indian reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
My goodness this book actually teaches you how to think in terms of Object orientation and design patterns
I have never seen a better book on design pattern; it makes expert out of novice (OK fine it makes you comfortable with design patterns)
Ok I would say this book is well written is really cool
Once you finish this book; you will find a lot of buzz words (news letters) from Heinz M. Kabutz, Bruce Eckel, and other java Gurus will start making sense. (Kool you will find GOF easy to read)
Clearly explains fundamental Design patterns, and provides a deep in-sight into the working of each patterns
I think what -ever ones level of programming experience and irr-respective of language used one should buy this book.
All well said this book is pretty slow to read and some times you find the authors are too verbose and you find your self not having enough time to finish this book.
Probably the authors could have omitted some very elementary materials and I would like a book of this calibre to be read faster
I find moving between pages are bit slower and examples could have been more computer science oriented (Say GOF used a editor for explaining patterns)you happen to get to a pattern much faster (Thinking in terms of ducks & pizza's are fun but doesn't sink in fast enough). The authors could have explained more about design patterns embedded into java API's.
The head-first series approaches the topics in terms of
Clear-cut explanation +Simple examples + Work-book style of exercise (you might find it vaguely similar to Schaum's series kind of approach That u happen to use in college- Hope some one inspirered by this review writes 2000 solved prob in design pattern's )
The best way to read this book is to use it as a work-book style of reading (Writing), so buy a pack of pencils and fiddle with the examples.
Well solve all the problems provided in the book, thankfully they are simple and doesn't much of your time. (Answers are available in the book for most of the problems)
But any way as I said this material is explosive I would like to thank the authors for writing such a wonderful book.
I would wish that the authors will write a book on the following topics
Head-First Object Oriented Analysis and Design
Head-First J2EE Design –patterns. |
David Veenemann (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
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. |
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