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Software Patterns Series
Pattern Hatching: Design Patterns Applied
Software developers now recognize the value of design patterns in helping build better software more efficiently. As a result, design patterns have become extremely popular in the software development community. Pattern Hatching explains and enhances the information from the seminal work in the field, Design Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. The hands-on approach offered by John Vlissides, co-author of Design Patterns, enables you to better understand the pattern development process, and therefore identify and write your own patterns. The author's insights will further allow you to apply the original 23 patterns by example.
160 pages, Paperback
First published July 2, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 7, 2016
John Vlissides, one of the GoF authors, goes through design of an imaginary file system, exploring and applying design patterns. While a good read, I had a tough time grasping everything because code examples were in C++.
July 6, 2023
This book is quite good, but there is not much to take away.
First, unlike the GoF, this book only targets the C++ language, and even if you're a C++ developer, there is still very little to learn. Let me explain.
In the first part, we see John apply the GoF design patterns to a sample program - that's the "Design Patterns Applied" announced in the subtitle.
I liked this part of the book but found that the given example (a file system modeled with objects) is not realistic and feeds the narrative that object-oriented designs are fancy concepts that cannot be applied in real applications.
The second part revisits some of the classic patterns (observer, visitor, and singleton in particular) to address some of the issues that were not covered in the GoF. For example, it talks about the initialization order of the singletons and about the coupling in the visitor pattern. This part is interesting, but I think that those issues are well-known now.
John also presents two "new" patterns: Generation Gap, and Typed Message. The first one consists in using an abstract class for code generated by a tool (for example, a UI designer) and a derived class for customizations so that the generator can override the files without losing the user-written code. The second pattern is a variation of Observer, where the callback receives a strongly typed message so that you can listen to specific events instead of watching the whole object.
These patterns are useful, and we've seen them used in the wild, but they could be presented in just a few pages.
This is roughly what there is to learn in this book; as you can see, there is very little material. However, I must say that John does a very good writing job which makes this book pleasant to read.
First, unlike the GoF, this book only targets the C++ language, and even if you're a C++ developer, there is still very little to learn. Let me explain.
In the first part, we see John apply the GoF design patterns to a sample program - that's the "Design Patterns Applied" announced in the subtitle.
I liked this part of the book but found that the given example (a file system modeled with objects) is not realistic and feeds the narrative that object-oriented designs are fancy concepts that cannot be applied in real applications.
The second part revisits some of the classic patterns (observer, visitor, and singleton in particular) to address some of the issues that were not covered in the GoF. For example, it talks about the initialization order of the singletons and about the coupling in the visitor pattern. This part is interesting, but I think that those issues are well-known now.
John also presents two "new" patterns: Generation Gap, and Typed Message. The first one consists in using an abstract class for code generated by a tool (for example, a UI designer) and a derived class for customizations so that the generator can override the files without losing the user-written code. The second pattern is a variation of Observer, where the callback receives a strongly typed message so that you can listen to specific events instead of watching the whole object.
These patterns are useful, and we've seen them used in the wild, but they could be presented in just a few pages.
This is roughly what there is to learn in this book; as you can see, there is very little material. However, I must say that John does a very good writing job which makes this book pleasant to read.
September 30, 2007
A fairly decent primer on rationalizing how and why to use certain design patterns.
October 8, 2012
great book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews