Rating: 
Summary: waste of money
Review: A poorly written and poorly designed catalog of patterns. Hard to read, with a bibliograph/index that takes up approx 1/3 of the book. Save your money
Rating:
Summary: waste of money
Review: A poorly written and poorly designed catalog of patterns. Hard to read, with a bibliograph/index that takes up approx 1/3 of the book. Save your money
Rating: 
Summary: Just what I was looking for
Review: After reading the "Gang of Four" book, and Fowler's "Analysis Patterns", I borrowed this book from a friend. It is just what I have been looking for. This book can be read from cover to cover to get an overview of patterns, as well as be used as a reference (which seems to be what the authors intended). All in all, a very useful book for someone who is using or wants to start using design patterns.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent as a reference pointer
Review: As a body of literature expands, it reaches the point where collections of detailed explanations become too large and unwieldy to be examined efficiently. When this occurs, it is very helpful for people to collect and organize the descriptions of the features, so that practitioners can quickly look up the general descriptions. That is what Linda Rising has done with software patterns.
Each pattern entry in the almanac has the basic information: * Pattern name
* Category list of where it is used
* Source citation
* URL if applicable
* What it is designed to do
* Related patterns
* An experience report citation if applicable Most of the descriptions take up less than a third of a page, so the author has erred on the side of brevity. This was the proper approach, as this is a reference book of brief explanations designed to serve as a primer and a collection of pointers to more detailed information.
The good, brief descriptions aside, the real quality of books of this type is measured by the ease of discovery when you conduct a search. The different levels of indexing and the ease with which you can understand them is where one book rises above another. The opening list organizes the patterns alphabetically according to category, the index at the end is approximately one-third of the book and nineteen pages of bibliography are included in the middle. That makes it easy to find a pattern, whether you know it by name or by usage.
This is a reference book that you will make use of if you are serious about applying the advantages that software patterns can provide. Neat and well organized, you should be able to find any of the patterns in a matter of seconds, even with minimum knowledge.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Catalog
Review: Considering that one of the hard parts of applying patterns is finding initially the right one for the problem at hand, this is an excellent catalog to support one in this task. Certainly, it's not a book to start learning about patterns. But after one has done the required homework (reading the GoF and POSA book) it's an excellent place to start hunting for additional patterns. I especially love the multiple indices. I missed two things. I would have liked to see a better context desciption for each pattern and I missed a few patterns that I consider useful. Among those are the recently published "SanFrancisco Design Patterns", although Pattern purists may possibly argue whether the latter already qualify as patterns by the "rule of three". In any case, a very good (4 1/2 stars) addition to ones desktop!
Rating: 
Summary: A Useful Catalogue of Patterns
Review: Having worked my way through a good proportion of the famous 'Design Patterns' book I'm always on the lookout for a simpler introductory book that I can recommend to people new to the subject. In many ways this book fulfills that rôle. It is a comprehensive catalogue of pretty much every important pattern published. It includes lots of reference material and a wealth of information on where to find more information. Its weakness is that it includes so many patterns. There is quite a lot of duplication (or, alternatively, variations on a theme) and the quest to include everything means that there is only a limited amount of information about any particular pattern. Additionally, there seems to be little discrimination between what I would describe as 'important patterns' (such as Factories or Composites) and trivial ones (such as the oft quoted 'George Washington is dead'). Patterns were first developed by people working in the language smalltalk. They have since outgrown their origins but seem reluctant to let go. As a result you'll find a disproportionate number of examples worked out in that language. Although not insurmountable, it is still a barrier that will hinder the majority of programmers. Fewer examples are also worked out in other, more common, languages such as Java and C++. Since no single language is right for all programmers, I'd have liked to have seen more emphasis on the UML diagrams. Overall, this is a useful reference work to have available in the office though not an essential one for your bookshelf.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: I should probably have read the previous reviews more carefully before buying this book... It was not what I was looking for. If you have a wealth of patterns-related material, it may probably be a good addition, providing an extensive index (or more precisely multiple cross-indexes) to patterns and patterns-related publications and resources. But really don't expect to LEARN anything from this book... The 1 to 3 sentences describing each entry are just too short and lack the uniformity of some common representation or formalism. So the index is rich, but don't expect to buy anything else than an index.
Rating:
Summary: great collection to have on the shelf
Review: Patterns. The current vocabulary of the high end designers and software architects. There are very few universities offering the M.S. courses on this subject; the future language of the software industry. Eric Gamma et al. started this revolution in 1995. It seems that there is no end to it. The author herself has significant experience in the area of Patterns. The book, as its name suggests, is indeed a very good almanac of patterns.
The author has taken truly a lot of pains to collect patterns from varous industries & put them in book form. Many of the patterns I have not heard of. That is one of the greatest strengths of the book; it gives you a bird's eye view of all the patterns used in various industries. Another thing I liked about the book, the author mentions relationships with other patterns, though not with details.
The layout of the book was not as appealing & the index takes many pages. The patterns should have been accompained by urls. Some url's are given. But, not all. But the effort is really herculean & the author has done a great job to put it in book form. Please note that the book is not for beginners. It is for users who know & use patterns & want to know more about other patterns. I hope the author will come up with more patterns in the near future.
Rating:
Summary: Hypertext Wanted!
Review: Somewhere along the line, AWL decided to release the GOF book as a CD, entitled "Design Patterns CD". I personally found the cross-linking of patterns via hypertext to be extremely valuable, and "The Pattern Almanac 2000" cries out for the same treatment. Frequently while reading/scanning this text I found myself wishing that each pattern was linked to its on-line source (where available), or that I could connect to related patterns or documents regarding experience with their use. This book is, as others have pointed out, an index. Having this in softcopy would provide another dimension of use that would markedly increase its value.
Rating:
Summary: Hypertext Wanted!
Review: Somewhere along the line, AWL decided to release the GOF book as a CD, entitled "Design Patterns CD". I personally found the cross-linking of patterns via hypertext to be extremely valuable, and "The Pattern Almanac 2000" cries out for the same treatment. Frequently while reading/scanning this text I found myself wishing that each pattern was linked to its on-line source (where available), or that I could connect to related patterns or documents regarding experience with their use. This book is, as others have pointed out, an index. Having this in softcopy would provide another dimension of use that would markedly increase its value.
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