The Easiest Way to Learn Design Patterns

One thing that makes you truly stand out as a software engineer is a good knowledge of design patterns. Knowing them makes you quicker at solving problems. It makes you much better at understanding architecture. And it significantly improves your chances of landing a good job, as it makes you better at solving problems during technical interviews. However, the biggest problem with the design patterns is that they are hard to learn. Most of them are not very intuitive. Therefore getting to understand them at the level where you can use them usually takes a long time. Many developers just give up, which prevents them from unlocking their full potential. This book aims to solve this problem. It takes a very different approach from how design patterns are normally taught. It does it by providing sufficient context first. Instead of jumping into the UML diagrams and code samples, the book provides descriptions of real-life software engineering challenges that developers can easily relate to. For each of these scenarios, appropriate design patterns are listed with a summary of how each of them can solve a given problem. Only then, when sufficient context has been provided, we jump into the code examples. The process of effective learning is not about memorization. It's about adding new associations to the existing knowledge. And this is the approach this book has taken. Because of its structure, this book can also be effectively used as a reference source. It allows you to look up an appropriate design pattern as you are facing a problem of a particular type. The process of effective learning is not about memorization. It's about associations. You learn new things easily when you can clearly see how new facts related to your existing knowledge. And this is precisely the method that this book is built around. You won't have to brute-force your way into design patterns. In fact, you won't even start with the design patterns. First, we will go through a list of common problems that software developers are required to solve. Those are the things that every software developer can associate with. Even if you haven't faced a particular type of a problem yet, you will still be able to easily understand its description. For each of these problems, we will go through the design patterns that can solve it. And for each one of them, you will go through its core principle and the description of how it can solve this type of a problem. Only then you will be invited to examine this particular design pattern in detail, so you can understand how to implement it in your own code. This structure of the book also makes it valuable as a reference book. Even when you don't know or don't remember design patterns, looking them up becomes easy. What you need to find is a description of the type of a problem you are trying to solve. And then you will be able to follow it to find the actual design patterns that you can apply to solve it. Therefore this book is not only an effective learning tool. It's also a reference book that's incredibly easy to navigate. It's been structured in such a way that you'll be able to find the right answer in seconds.