Bookreview: Head First–Design Patterns

Info:

• 688 pages
• published October 2004
• ISBN: 978-0596007126
• Authors: Eric T. Freeman, Elisabeth Robson, Bert Bates & Kathy Sierra
• Available here

Looking for a refresh of my knowledge about design patterns, I decided to purchase this book due to its high recommendations.
The book covers the following design patterns in a very big detail ( using the Java language to show code examples ).

• Strategy pattern
• Observer pattern
• Decorator pattern
• Factory pattern
• Singleton pattern
• Command pattern
• Adapter and Facade pattern
• Template pattern
• Iterator and Composite pattern
• State pattern
• Proxy pattern
• Compound patterns
• Extra overview of less common patterns

This book is just perfect for beginners, but for people with already some knowledge or more, this book start to be a drag pretty soon. The examples and examplecontexts are so simple and everyone of them is explained in more then one way. This leads to a very repetitive reading. I had real troubles keeping my attention to reading through all of it. To be honest I only read the first 6 or 7 chapters, all the other once I “overviewed”, just looking through the definition parts and code examples.
Talking about code examples, as a .NET enthusiast, the Java wasn’t that hard to understand.
Ableit, I would recommend this as a very good introduction into the GoF (Gang of Four) book. That is still on my list, but I’m pretty sure that I would be able to devour that book way easier now.