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Head First Design Patterns: A Brain-Friendly Guide 1st Edition

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 2,155 ratings

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Provides design patterns to help with software development using the Java programming language.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Eric Freeman recently ended nearly a decade as a media company executive, having held the position of CTO of Disney Online & Disney.com at The Walt Disney Company. Eric is now devoting his time to WickedlySmart.com and lives with his wife and young daughter in Austin, TX. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University.

Elisabeth Robson is co-founder of Wickedly Smart, an education company devoted to helping customers gain mastery in web technologies. She's co-author of four bestselling books, Head First Design Patterns, Head First HTML and CSS, Head First HTML5 Programming, and Head First JavaScript Programming.

Bert Bates is a 20-year software developer, a Java instructor, and a co-developer of Sun's upcoming EJB exam (Sun Certified Business Component Developer). His background features a long stint in artificial intelligence, with clients like the Weather Channel, A&E; Network, Rockwell, and Timken.

Kathy Sierra has been interested in learning theory since her days as a game developer (Virgin, MGM, Amblin'). More recently, she's been a master trainer for Sun Microsystems, teaching Sun's Java instructors how to teach the latest technologies to customers, and a lead developer of several Sun certification exams. Along with her partner Bert Bates, Kathy created the Head First series. She's also the original founder of the Software Development/Jolt Productivity Award-winning javaranch.com, the largest (and friendliest) all-volunteer Java community.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (November 1, 2004)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 638 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0596007124
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0596007126
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.99 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.99 x 1.37 x 9.21 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 2,155 ratings

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4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
2,155 global ratings
All images are squashed on the Kindle edition, affecting readability - get paper version instead
3 Stars
All images are squashed on the Kindle edition, affecting readability - get paper version instead
This is strictly a comment for the Kindle edition. I find the formatting of the pictures unreadable, and that this has a very negative impact on the usability of the book. IThe images, which are core to the text, are centered at 50% width of the page. This requires me to manually zoom in each time I want to see something clearly, a process which I find rather cumbersome to say the least.I've tested this both on a (high resolution) Samsung Galaxy S2 Tablet (Android Kindle; see screenshots) as well as my old Kindle DXG. Forget about seeing them on the OG Paperwhite.This issue is not unique to this book, however I do wish the authors would take the time to ensure their content is readable on the Kindle editions.
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2012
I purchased this book about a year ago and devoted a number of hours each week going through it. I am a software developer by trade, but never took a computer science course in my life, mostly because I was self-taught as a kid and all of this pre-dated the Web by about 20 years.

In any event, one area where I knew I was lacking was a formal understanding of design patterns. I was in the middle of a fairly large enterprise application, and while I was fully versed in Object Oriented Programming (and had even taught it in the past), I realized that everyone we were hiring out of college "spoke" a different language than I did, talking about singletons, factories, MVC, etc.

This book covers those and many, many more, in a completely involving and revolutionary way. It's basically designed with the Java language in mind, but I'm a .Net developer, never having learned Java. However, the book is so thorough and intuitive, that I decided to do all of the examples in C# (close enough to Java that in many cases, there's almost a 1-to-1 relationship between my home-grown example and the one in the book.

So for me, the book's benefit was two-fold: exposure to both design patterns and the Java language. In many cases, I was able to ".Net-ify" the examples to take advantage of specific features of .Net. A good example was in the Observer pattern where you have an object that changes over time, and other objects ("observers") need to be aware of this change. The book presents a language-agnostic approach, where the observable object registers all of its observers, and cycles through them notifying each one that it has changed. With .Net, it's much easier (and more appropriate) to implement this using events, where the observable object doesn't care who's watching, it just announces "I've changed!" and each observer can then decide how to handle that event.

But I digress... ultimately, I just threw myself into this book, doing every example as written, and then modifying those examples to function with the .Net mentality. I even did all the pencil exercises, puzzles, etc. It's all part of the learning process, right?

So, in a nutshell, if you need to learn design patterns, get this book. It's a lot of fun, and chock full of great information and examples that you'll be able to apply to your own projects right away.
18 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2015
Head First Design Patterns is an excellent introductory text for design patterns, plus object oriented design in general. Each chapter in the main part of the book covers one or two of the most common design patterns in great depth, including motivation, sample code, exercises, as well as answering many of the questions a reader is likely to have. Additionally, one of the things that makes the book great is that each chapter uses the context of the design pattern to introduce one or two important object oriented design principles such as the Open-Closed Principle and the Principle of Least Knowledge. Less common patterns are covered in the appendix, although in much less depth.

I bought this book for my 17-year-old nephew -- who is in the second year of a high school computer programming course -- as a companion to the Gang of Four book. I think the two books work well together, with Head First Design Patterns working as a more accessible introduction to design patterns, and the Gang of Four book serving as a reference for later on. He definitely finds the Head First book easier to read as a beginner. Even I, with a college degree in Computer Science and 20 years in the software development industry, find it valuable, at least as a review.

For those wondering about which edition they will get, I bought this book through Amazon and received the tenth anniversary edition, updated for Java 8. The main difference is that it takes advantage of the newly-introduced Lambda Expressions. Although the book uses Java throughout, C# developers will have little if any trouble with the examples. In many cases, the code is identical.

Slight nitpick: Some of the patterns in the appendix are given short shrift in the interest of space. For example, the section on the Visitor Pattern leaves out the important fact that one of the main motivations for the pattern is to overcome the limitations of languages that support only single dispatch. Said another way, the Visitor Pattern is trivial to implement in languages that support multiple dispatch. For more detail on these design patterns, I recommend the Gang of Four book, or online resources.
5 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Euber
5.0 out of 5 stars Muito bom
Reviewed in Brazil on August 9, 2018
Excelente livro, boa didática e já utiliza o Java 8
akash
5.0 out of 5 stars Very informative and creative book by design, its a design pattern in it self
Reviewed in India on September 18, 2019
Received the book in good quality.

As a programmer this book is must have. Cover major DESIGN PATTERNS in very creative manner ani content is engaging aa its not written in conventional ways.

Paper quality is somewhat good, main issue is with the font, it is very small, they could have used the margin space for increase the font size. As they left luch of margin than needed that's the only issue.
Mellgood
5.0 out of 5 stars Best buy per chi ha già una conoscenza base di java e vuole passare ad un livello superiore
Reviewed in Italy on November 24, 2017
Ho acquistato diversi libri sui design pattern e sono finiti tutti sullo scaffale, prima di arrivare alla conclusione. Il motivo è semplice: erano tutti noiosi.
Questo libro invece scherza, ironizza, ti parla, ti chiede pareri ma senza mai inerrogarti... insomma ti insegna le cose senza farti ccorgere che lo sta facendo!
Davvero positiva l'esperienza di questo libro, che ha lasciato in me un mondo di sensazioni e di sapere, a costo mentale davvero minimo.

Il libro parte da concetti molto basilari di programmazione e progettazione software, li combina tra loro e offre un continum narrativo che porta il lettore a comprendere realmene i concetti che sono alla base dei pattern stessi, fornendo gli strumenti necessari a capire dove sia meglio fare ricorso ad essi all'interno di un progetto. Al termine della lettura non si sapranno di certo a memoria tutti i pattern, ma sicuramente sarà rimasto impresso nel lettore quale strategia utilizzare di volta in volta per raggiungere lo scopo di adattare il software al cambiamento.
Davvero consigliato
3 people found this helpful
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Daniel Vera Morales
5.0 out of 5 stars El mejor libro que he adquirido en mi vida
Reviewed in Mexico on November 22, 2016
Es un libro que todo desarrollador debería leer, vale mucho y es una joya. Son claros y concisos al momento de explicar los temas además siempre mencionan las variantes de los patrones y en muchos casos muestran como lo hace Java y si existe alguna falta en la manera en que java ha implementado ciertos patrones de diseño.
One person found this helpful
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Adam
5.0 out of 5 stars Simple to follow
Reviewed in Australia on March 14, 2020
Easy to follow and understand