Head First Design Patterns

What will you learn from this book?

You know you don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so you look to Design Patterns: the lessons learned by those who’ve faced the same software design problems. With Design Patterns, you get to take advantage of the best practices and experience of others so you can spend your time on something more challenging. Something more fun. This book shows you the patterns that matter, when to use them and why, how to apply them to your own designs, and the object-oriented design principles on which they’re based. Join hundreds of thousands of developers who’ve improved their object-oriented design skills through Head First Design Patterns. 

What’s so special about this book?

If you’ve read a Head First book, you know what to expect: a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works. With Head First Design Patterns, 2E you’ll learn design principles and patterns in a way that won’t put you to sleep, so you can get out there to solve software design problems and speak the language of patterns with others on your team.

Table of Contents

1. Welcome to Design Patterns: intro to Design Patterns
2. Keeping your Objects in the Know: the Observer Pattern
3. Decorating Objects: the Decorator Pattern
4. Baking with OO Goodness: the Factory Pattern
5. One-of-a-Kind Objects: the Singleton Pattern
6. Encapsulating Invocation: the Command Pattern
7. Being Adaptive: the Adapter and Facade Patterns
8. Encapsulating Algorithms: theTemplate Method Pattern
9. Well-Managed Collections: the Iterator and Composite Patterns
10. The State of Things: the State Pattern
11. Controlling Object Access: the Proxy Pattern
12. Patterns of Patterns: compound patterns
13. Patterns in the Real World: better living with patterns
14. Appendix: Leftover Patterns

About the Author

Eric Freeman is a computer scientist, technology writer, entrepreneur and a former CTO at the Walt Disney Company. Eric’s most recent book, Head First Learn to Code, is a beginners book for coding and computational thinking. Eric lives with his wife and young daughter in Austin, Texas. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University.

Elisabeth Robson is the co-author of several Head First books, including Head First Design Patterns, and is a principal at WickedlySmart, an online learning company for software developers.