Customer comments on this selection.
 First glance may resembles a comic book, but ...
At first glance this book resembles a comic book, and this may persuade you to put away the book. I recommend that you go through the first chapter and make your decision.
In reality as SW Engineers while designing a system we consider a set of requirements required to meet current deadline. We also attempt to think through several permutations and combinations of these requirements that may be required in future. Often, we fall short in conceiving all that is need to meet future requirements.
This book walks through such scenarios and at times points out how to design software while mitigating such changes to minimal in future releases.
At times some examples present a simplistic approach. Also I would have liked to see some performance analysis while comparing one approach with other.
 Accessible and immediately useful
[Reviewed by XPSD member Ryan Shiffer]
My previous experience in studying design patterns has been met with failure. I have tried getting through the Gang of Four book on design patterns, but reading it for me was about the same as reading the dictionary. Reading this book made the experience of learning design patterns an enjoyable experience instead of a literary root canal. Head First Design Patterns takes the most useful (and understandable) design patterns and makes them accessible to the everyday programmer.
Each chapter tackles one or sometime two related design patterns and creates a rich example to explain it with. Some examples are a little contrived, but they do the job to explain the patterns with real code. Along with this are lots of discussions and other interesting exercises to hold your attention. These help to further explain the pattern, some of the pattern's pitfalls, and where and when it is appropriate to use the pattern.
Along with introducing design pattern, this book reinforces object-oriented design principles and best practices. This proved to be a useful addition to the design patterns and helps root them in the larger picture of object-oriented design. I found myself immediately applying these principles and design patterns in my coding and reviewing older code where I "thought" I was using design patterns correctly.
Wow, never seen it put this way
If you couldn't get your head around the original patterns book before, then this book will change that notion very quickly. It delivers on it's promise and you remember what you read - now that's a bonus in the very fast paced world of software engineering. Highly recomended if you seriously care about your software design.
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.
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.
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