OO Design Pattern book recommendations.

[Addanc]

What book or web links recommendations can the esteemed members suggest with regard to design patterns; if possible with an embedded slant.

[NotAllThere]

Head First Design Patterns from the O'Reilly press. These books are the only larn-yersel books I've ever managed to work through. Don't know about embedded though.

[VectraMan]

I thought THE book was the Gamma-Helm-Johnson-Vlissides one, which is what I have. I must read it some day.

[Jaws]

I agree the head first one is good (although probably not so good for reference).

"Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices" by Robert C Martin in C# contains definitions of quite a few good patterns to use (in general), and is a good book to read in my opinion.

I find myself referring to "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" by Martin Fowler as well occasionally. I come across a lot of systems designed using patterns mentioned in this book. Although is unlikely to be relevent for embedded.

[thunderlizard]

Yes Gamma et al is the one to start with. After that you might as well pick up new patterns one by one off the internet - Microsoft have some good ones.


Martin Fowler's one (there are many but I'm thinking of one called something like "patterns of enterprise applications") is OK too but I wouldn't praise it from the rooftops like some of his other books.

[NickFitz]

I'd recommend reading Head First Design Patterns first, then working through the Gang of Four book (Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Gamma et al). GoF is pretty dense and really needs to be read at least twice to properly get to grips with it, but with the Head First book under your belt it'll be a lot clearer.

The theory of design patterns is at such a level of abstraction that it really doesn't make much sense to think it being presented with "an embedded slant", or a slant to any specific problem domain. There are, however, bound to be catalogues of patterns that are found in embedded software development, and it's probably more likely that they'll be found online rather than in a book.