Cyrille Martraire

The more patterns developers know, the most efficient they become within a team: it only takes one or two words (the pattern name) to communicate a design decision or proposal, instead of 10 mn of explanations. Communication also gets much more accurate and to-the-point (or less fuzzy).

Because patterns often form a pattern language, not only they offer a standard vocabulary but they also help structuring the mind by their relationships: patterns can be related as exclusive alternatives, or rather often-go-together, which is useful.

Patterns are not always supposed to be “tricks” to learn, or extra complication to introduce to a design; indeed even obvious and uninteresting pattern are worth reading in books, just for the social advantage of being able to reference them. Going further, sometime you can just go to the book to find out which is the pattern that you just did without knowing its name…

1.  Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) by Erich Gamma et al. The most essential book, a definitive must-have. Every experienced software developer must know these 23 design patterns.

2.  Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series) by Martin Fowler The essential complement to the GoF, to extend the benefits of patterns from design to analysis (closer to the problem to solve in the domain). Each pattern will not necessarily teach you a new solution, but will always give you have a standard name for each solution, which is already worth the book.

3.  Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans A book that can change the way you deal with software. Considering the domain as the main driver of the design is so powerful an approach! Works best together with the analysis patterns.

4.  Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) by Martin Fowler Other analysis patterns to solve many technical problems, useful complement to Analysis Patterns.

5.  Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) by Gregor Hohpe Very complete pattern language (both test and visual vocabulary) about messaging, will improve the communication within a team a lot, both in efficiency and in accuracy.

6.  Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 2: Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects by Douglas Schmidt Important book, more specialized toward optimized low-level problems (web servers…). often quoted. The other volumes are less relevant for today software development on modern languages or virtual machines.

7.  Patterns in Java: A Catalog of Reusable Design Patterns Illustrated with UML, 2nd Edition, Volume 1 by Mark Grand The book I discovered design patterns in, quite affordable, but some colleagues do not like it that much.