Software Design Patterns Every Developer Should Learn
Over 20 years ago the iconic computer science book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” was first published. The four authors of the book: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, have since been dubbed “The Gang of Four”. In technology circles, you’ll often see this nicknamed shorted to GoF. Even though the GoF Design Patterns book was published over 20 years ago, it still continues to be an Amazon best seller. The GoF wrote the book in a C++ context but it still remains very relevant to programming. C++ and Java are both object-oriented languages. The GoF authors, through their experience in coding large scale enterprise systems using C++, saw common patterns emerge. These design patterns are not unique to C++. The design patterns can be applied in any object oriented language. The GoF Design Patterns are broken into three categories: Creational Patterns for the creation of objects; Structural Patterns to provide relationship between objects; and finally, Behavioral Patterns to help define how objects interact.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (1994) is a software engineering book describing software design patterns. The book was written by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, with a foreword by Grady Booch. The book is divided into two parts, with the first two chapters exploring the capabilities and pitfalls of object-oriented programming, and the remaining chapters describing 23 classic software design patterns. The book includes examples in C++ and Smalltalk. It has been influential to the field of software engineering and is regarded as an important source for object-oriented design theory and practice. More than 500,000 copies have been sold in English and in 13 other languages. The authors are often referred to as the Gang of Four (GoF)