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Rating: 
Summary: It made me laugh, it made me cry...
Review: Although quite a departure from his previous works, "The Joy of Cooking" and "The Joy of Sex", I found this book, the third in the series, oddly compelling and a real page-turner. Brandon's effective use of foreshadowing only adds to the shock value of the surprise ending.
Rating: 
Summary: Stay away from this book
Review: As I was just learning OOP, the book called Object-Oriented Thought Process by Matt Weisfeld made it all make sense. SO clearly explained, assuming nothing.Then I got this book next. What a waste. The author doesn't explain anything - he seems to assume you're in his head already. You know those teachers? They're good at what they do, but can't really explain it too well. So instead they just start doing it, and have you watch, though that doesn't explain the process. "I wanted to make a hamburger store, so I decided to use the Decorator Pattern and the Such-n-Such Pattern - here's 1000 lines of Java code!" Never explaining how we would choose a pattern - which pattern - or why. He either goes TOO low (a whole chapter to "Sometimes you need to use different languages for different purposes." ... DUH!) or too high (jumping right in and doing things without explaining why he made that choice.) All-in-all when the book was done I felt I hadn't learned a thing from it, which was really sad, because I was really eager to understand the process of how I could use patterns to solve programming problems.
Rating: 
Summary: like the worst teachers I've had. didn't learn a thing.
Review: As I was just learning OOP, the book called Object-Oriented Thought Process by Matt Weisfeld made it all make sense. SO clearly explained, assuming nothing. Then I got this book next. What a waste. The author doesn't explain anything - he seems to assume you're in his head already. You know those teachers? They're good at what they do, but can't really explain it too well. So instead they just start doing it, and have you watch, though that doesn't explain the process. "I wanted to make a hamburger store, so I decided to use the Decorator Pattern and the Such-n-Such Pattern - here's 1000 lines of Java code!" Never explaining how we would choose a pattern - which pattern - or why. He either goes TOO low (a whole chapter to "Sometimes you need to use different languages for different purposes." ... DUH!) or too high (jumping right in and doing things without explaining why he made that choice.) All-in-all when the book was done I felt I hadn't learned a thing from it, which was really sad, because I was really eager to understand the process of how I could use patterns to solve programming problems.
Rating: 
Summary: A useful primer
Review: It is a good read for some of the why in using software patterns in the design. I liked the author's suggested process of doing more design and less coding. This seems to me to be how projects do get done on time and within budget. The attempts at humor and several badly written parts hurt the book. The summary at the end of chapter 1 is a good example. It is a complete negation of the chapter's point and is almost unreadable. This happens in a number of places. The humor appears in the wrong places, often hurting the strength of the the author's message. The book is worth reading, but not for those who are looking for more depth on the why of using patterns.
Rating:
Summary: Stay away from this book
Review: Random ramblings on patterns sprinkled with ridiculous cartoons
depicting fictitious sofware development meetings. The whole book barely has 100 pages, but if you eliminates the useless pictures and diagrams you're left with half of that.
Rating:
Summary: Workshop for Design Patterns
Review: There's a bunch of new beginner's books on design patterns today ! Well, in fact these books are much better than "Design Pattern" rewritten in simpler words, and that's the good surprise. Now the bad news : if I compare this book to "Design Patterns Explained", well, I prefer DP explained. Honestly. This one is lighter. But with several little case studies you also can consider this book as a workshop on design patterns ! Without code in annexes, this book is only 110 pages long, which is rather short.
Rating:
Summary: A little too light for a book
Review: You can finish reading this book pretty fast because it's very short, as others already commented on. The good part is its three extensive examples covering such design patterns as the Decorator and Builder. I downloaded the source code and worked out the first two examples (one in C++ and the other in Java), while ignoring the third about gaming/playing cards, which is not a domain I am interested in. For the most part the code works except for a couple of bugs (e.g., missing destructor in one instance) that I discovered while doing code editing and compilation, which would probably have been overlooked if you only read through the pages of code. The reading and exercise were certainly helpful, at least for a better understanding of the few patterns emphasized in the examples. The detailed UML diagrams matching the code are also a good point for the book.
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