Daniel's Reviews > Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

I'd recommend this book to any Object-Oriented programmer who wants to be even remotely familiar with the approaches being used to write production systems these days... The Design Pattern based approach to software engineering has definitely caught on, and if you aren't familiar with at least the basic patterns, *you need to be* - not only to they make logical sense, but real development teams use the pattern names often, in discussions amongst multiple developers, to describe the systems/concepts/etc being discussed. If you're not familiar with them, then you'll quickly get lost in the conversation, et al. There are other books on J2EE patterns, or Unit Test Patterns, etc. but, you need to be familiar with the basics first, and *THIS IS THE BOOK* - Commonly reffered to as the GoF (or "Gang of Four") Book, this is one hard cover that you *MUST HAVE ON YOUR BOOKSHELF*, period.