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Book Review - "Head First Design Patterns"
At 11:39 AM on Feb 15, 2005, Matthew Schmidt wrote:
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I will be honest. When I first saw this book, I judged it by its cover. I also judged it by thumbing through it and looking at the gaudy captions and pictures in it. Based on that, combined with its use of teen slang such as "wicked-cool", I was ready to write this book off as being geared towards high school age nerds rather than serious software engineers. But I could not have been more wrong...
Read the whole review now!
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Re: Book Review - "Head First Design Patterns"
I agree with the review. I had seen "head first" books at the store and I always passed them by, thinking they were geared towards newbies...or perhaps that they were just lacking in good material (talk about judging a book by its cover)...anyway I eventually picked up the design patterns book and skimmed through the first chapter and i that was it.I went home, ordered it online (from bookpool.com ..they had 43% off at the time)...got it in the mail and read it front to back in 2-3 weeks. Typically most books aren't very "readable"...but this one was great.
I hope they get their website up soon (they mention, http://www.wickedlysmart.com in their book but it is "still coming").
This is a must read for anyone interested in design patterns, or just oo-design.
-codecraig
http://www.codecraig.com
http://jdraggable.dev.java.net
www.codecraig.com || SwingFX || JDraggable
Re: Book Review - "Head First Design Patterns"
...just read the original authors bio...very interesting. How did you get involved with Lion Research and Programming?What a combination!
www.codecraig.com || SwingFX || JDraggable
Re: Book Review - "Head First Design Patterns"
i second this review.i'm about 1/2 way through this book and already i have a much clearer picture of what the design patterns do and how better to apply them.
i would definately recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning more about design patterns and as a general reference book.
Java code is mostly 'design patterns'
I prefer the term 'language smell'. The C2 wiki defines it as 'A LanguageSmell is a CodeSmell that occurs due to the inability of the language to express the concept cleanly. Sometimes called an "idiom" or a "pattern."'. When I look at any piece of Java code (including mine), its about 75% boilerplate. This is a very bad thing. A programmer should only have to write code that solves the problem at hand -- writing verbose 'glue' and 'patterns' is a waste of time, and makes a pretty convincing argument for metaprogramming and macro techniques, which tend to cut down such junk code drastically.Re: Book Review - "Head First Design Patterns"
Excellent review....I would have never thought about buying that book based on the cover....now I'm off to Amazon to order a copy (using JL's link to put a few pennies in their coffers :-)).Tom Pridham
Technologist & Founder
Coastal Software Solutions Inc.
office: 813.600.5053
Pridham@Mindspring.com
Re: Book Review - "Head First Design Patterns"
Well, behavioral ecology and conservation biology have always been my main interest in the field of biology. And I have always been particularly fascinated with lion behavior because they have such interesting social lives (they are the only truly social feline). I am also interested in lion conservation since they are rather threatened as a species. I wanted to combine my two interests in computer science and ecology. Of course, within any scientific field, there tends to be a lot of opportunity to combine computer science with your field. Almost all scientists need to build models for example, and often they have unique data storage requirements that can't readily be solved by off the shelf database solutions because they need to be able to perform some very complex or non-standard lookups and such to find complex relationships between various types of data (relationships that are not commonly used in business programming and such).So that's pretty much how I combined the two. Although I am a biology major, I am also taking several classes in computer science. I am considering either minoring in it, or possibly doing an independently designed major that combines computer science and biology.