Recently, I read this book and want to share my thoughts about it with you.
If you already know about GoF and their Design Patterns then the book will be a godsend for you. The author (and his team) did a great job to spread out GoF’s patterns into tiny, elemental patterns and to present the result to us. Why is it significant? It helps to understand the “big patterns” better and even build your own patterns.
To tell the truth, the first half of the book seemed to me very boring. A lot of reasoning about “the meaning of life” and etc. I even wanted to stop reading it. Then I understood what this book is really about and read it from cover to cover.
The main things which I’ve extracted from the book:
- Design patterns are divided into three categories: Elemental, Itermediate, GoF
- The patterns can be described using PIN notation (it looks fairly cool)
- Also, the patterns can be described in a formal way using Rho-calculus and Sigma-calculus.
- Elemental Design Patterns exist =)
Some notes
Also, I gathered few schemes of Intermediate patterns to show relations between them. These schemes show which of Elemental patterns are used for building Intermediate patterns and which of GoF patterns use Intermediate ones.
The book contains yet another idea that I consider important: The environmental context, the set of forces that create the situation in which the general problem of designing appropriate housing must be solved, is frequently ignored, and the solutions are generally only minimally satisfying or give rise to new problems that must be addressed.