Ivy Reisner’s Reviews > Head First Design Patterns > Status Update

This book is getting to me. I spent too much time today acting as a go-between and realized I'm a living Proxy pattern.

This might not be one of "The Big Two" guides to design patterns, but it's probably a better introduction than either of them. I was worried because it has a Java focus and I work primarily in Perl and C#, but it keeps things general enough (and stays well enough out of the "church of Java") to make that a non-issue.