Rating  - Very good book
I'm relatively new to Design Patters. Prior to reading this book I had read several other material on the web trying to get my head around design patterns and although that material was helpful, it didn't fully clarify to me the intent and usages of these patterns. However, when I read a sample chapter of this book online (on the Decorator Pattern), I instantly took a liking to it. The book has a very good way of explaining everything step by step and in a way that will make the topic more interesting to grasp.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who is new to the subject and wants to learn Design Patterns. This book (as even the authors mention) is not meant to be a reference book for professionals who already know about patterns. I think it's more suited to people who want to learn them from the ground up. I would give it 10 stars if I could.
Rating  - Very good book on patterns but examples leave questions
This is an excellent introductory book on patterns. They start out with the assumption that the reader does not really know what design patterns are or what they are good for. Developers who have been around awhile know about patterns, but overall I think their assumption is not a bad one: I think many of us have some ideas about patterns, and think we know some patterns, but don't really understand them. The book shines in its presentation of the patterns, even the ones we already "know," as extrapolations of basic OO design principles. The authors deserve very high marks for that.
They also have a lot of quirky, fun stuff in the book. It is, as another reviewer mentioned, almost insufferably cute. It's for the geek like me who wants to pretend we're not geeks, wink wink. Actually, I don't have any trouble with the humor, especially because sometimes it serves the valuable didactic purpose of helping one remember the points.
The negative points I have about the book are not primarily that the examples are simple; my main gripe is that the examples sometimes made things more confusing than they were before. For example, they spend an excellent first chapter discussing basic OO principles like "Favor Composition over Inheritance" and show how the Strategy pattern embodies them, and show a truly awful design in chapter 2 for Starbuzz Coffee (haha!) neglecting those principles, with a resulting explosion of classes. Very well.
But then, in chapter 4, they demonstrate the Factory pattern by eschewing composition in favor of inheritance, and creating an explosion of classes with all the varieties of pizza styles. Huh? Why are we suddenly dropping the principles that we've spent so much time on? Why not use composition with dependency injection as done in the "SimplePizzaFactory" example? Why not have a Pizza class that favors composition over inheritance? Now, there may in fact be good reasons, but they never discuss them. We're left wondering what's going on.
One more example: in discussing the Decorator pattern, they give what seems to me to be one of the worst uses of that pattern imaginable. "Condiments" are not "Beverages", and having a Beverage that chains to other Beverages seems very non-intuitive. Not at all a good example of "IS-A" relationships. Again, it's an illustration of the pattern, but a very jarring one that breaks reading continuity.
So, buy the book, read the book, "get" the patterns; but when you think some of the examples don't make sense, you're not alone.
Rating - Great book
This is a great book, very explicit, great examples, clear language and I couldn't stop reading. Very good.
Rating - Head First is good for your brain.
I love this book. It is my first Head First book and I intend to buy more. It is really a fun way to learn. Though the book deals with some advanced topics, the way the material is presented makes it easier to get into your brain.
My suggestion is to pick up one of these books in a book store, skim through it to get the idea of where they're coming from, then buy the book from Amazon. (It's cheaper.)
They use a lot of graphic characters, conversations amongst characters, crossword puzzles, etc. It's not just a text book but a way to learn new technical material. They take a potentially dry subject and make it tasty and exciting.
I hope to see more Head First books in the future.
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