By Fiodar Sazanavets
Design patterns are something that you will need to get familiar with as a programmer who works with object-oriented languages. This is primarily because they represent well-defined solutions to common software development problems. So, instead of thinking through all the details of your solution, you can simply check if any of the existing design patterns can be used. You won’t have to reinvent the wheel.
The main problem with design patterns is that they are not necessarily easy to learn. Many developers, especially the ones who don’t have a lot of software-building experience, struggle with them. But if you do struggle with them, it may prevent you from getting a programming job at a reputable organization. After all, recruiting managers often ask questions about design patterns. Otherwise, not knowing design patterns will make you less effective as a software developer, which will slow down your career progress.
The main reason why design patterns are so hard to learn is because of the way they are normally taught. Usually, if you pick pretty much any book on design patterns or open pretty much any online article about them, it would provide a collection of design patterns that you would need to go through. You would then have to go through each of them, try your best to understand the principles behind it, and only then try to figure out how to apply it in a real-life situation.
It’s a tedious process that doesn’t always produce the right results. It’s not uncommon for software developers to memorize just a handful of design patterns they have used in their projects. The remaining ones have been forgotten as soon as they’ve been learned. And it’s hard to figure out which design pattern applies in which situation if you only remember a handful of them.
This book provides a different approach. It uses a methodology that makes it easy to learn design patterns. So, you no longer have to brute-force your way through them. The process of effective learning is not about memorization. It’s about associations. You learn new things easily when you can see how new facts relate to your existing knowledge. And this is precisely the method that this book is built around.
You won’t have to brute-force your way into design patterns. You won’t even start with the design patterns. First, we will go through a list of common problems that software developers are required to solve. Those are the things that every software developer can associate with. Even if you haven’t faced a particular type of problem yet, you will still be able to easily understand its description. For each of these problems, we will go through the design patterns that can solve it. For each one of them, you will go through its core principle and the description of how it can solve this type of problem. Only then you will be invited to examine this particular design pattern in detail, so you can understand how to implement it in your own code.
This structure of the book also makes it valuable as a reference book. Even when you don’t know or don’t remember design patterns, looking them up becomes easy. What you need to find is a description of the type of problem you are trying to solve. And then you will be able to follow it to find the actual design patterns that you can apply to solve it.
Therefore this book is not only an effective learning tool. It’s also a reference book that’s incredibly easy to navigate. It’s been structured in such a way that you’ll be able to find the right answer in seconds.
