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Reading About Design Patterns

By Allen Holub

November 15, 2004 — (Page 1 of 3)
Good software must be designed before it’s built. Code that’s written without the benefit of design takes two to three times longer to write than necessary, and is usually considerably more buggy as well. This isn’t to say that all of the design for a large program must be complete before you write a line of code—the agile methodologies all depend on an incremental design process that parallels development.

But learning design is tough. It takes as long to learn to design well as it does to learn to code well; and the subject is, if anything, more difficult. Simply working with code libraries, or mastering the design of a couple of large systems, teaches you almost nothing about design itself. To make matters worse, it’s not really possible to write a single book that covers the entire subject of software design. It’s just too large a subject.

One essential topic in the design curriculum is design patterns. The notion of a design pattern is that certain patterns—systems of similar solutions to similar problems—emerge when you look at a lot of code. Good programmers who write quality code tend to gravitate to similar solutions to common problems. Once you recognize a “pattern” in these solutions, you can catalog the pattern. If you carry around such a catalog in your head (and you really need to know the patterns that well to apply them effectively), then you can apply these known-to-be-good solutions to your own programming problems right off the bat.

The result is better quality code that goes together faster. To my mind, design patterns are as central to the profession of programming as algorithms, data structures and the programming languages themselves. You’re not a true professional unless you know them cold.

Unfortunately, design patterns are a subject where the can’t-learn-it-from-a-book situation has been particularly pronounced. Most books on design patterns, including the original Gang of Four book—“Design Patterns,” by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides, published in 1995—take a catalog approach to the subject. The patterns are presented in isolation, one at a time. That never happens in the real world where they’re all jumbled together.

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