Intro to Design Patterns

Part of this class is going to be (at least for me anyway) an introduction to design patterns. In fact, the image to the left is the textbook for the class. Software design patterns are based on the work of Christopher Alexander, an architect who observed that building designs used and re-used the same patterns over and over.

So someone in Computer Science ported this idea over to software engineering and Bob’s your uncle…..software design patterns.

Now, this particular book was published in 1995. The year after I graduated high school. This is around the same time as people were discovering the Internet….and a fast computer was 486 with a turbo button. Why is this information important? Because I’m a little frustrated with the examples of this book  in a modern graduate course on software engineering.

I’ve had a class on C++ and I remember it being extremely difficult to understand the object oriented portion of the language. Having tinkered with C# and Java over the last couple of years, I tend to think more along those lines. Especially along with the lines of Java.

The examples in the book are given in C++ and Smalltalk. Both of which are OO languages…..but no where near as refined as Java or C#. Maybe it’s important that I understand from the old school level/perspective, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this ….it would be much easier to understand these examples with an updated text book. I mean in the age of the IT industry, this book is the equivalent of Dead Sea scrolls. Come on, really? This was the best course text book you could find?

ugghhhh