AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis

I can't believe the number of reviews on this site that compared the book to Design Patterns from GOF. If you bought it expecting the same, write yourself the one-star review. This book does have some problems, but it really does a whole lot of things very well.- It's easy, and fun, to read. The authors expertly inject humor and life into a dead topic. A dull book with good ideas will rot on the shelf.- It provides a fresh, new angle that has value. We programmers do not learn enough from war stories told around the water cooler.- It provides the other side of the design pattern. You really do need both, and this industry needed someone to take a stab at creating a template for antipatterns. Consider health care. You need diagnostics and preventative care. Ditto for auto maintenance. Operations research has been built around building models that work while trouble shooting the kinks in a system. The authors did a noble job of seeing the vacuum and stepping up to fill it.I find it incredible that this book has been slammed for something that it does not pretend to be. If you wrote a one star review because this book was not the second coming of the Design Patterns book, then shame on you. What you will get is a humerous look at some very real problems around software development. The bias is clearly toward project management, and that is a appropriate for a first book on antipatterns. That much was clear to me from browsing the book for a minute or two. Great job, team.If I had a criticism, it would be that the contributions from the four authors were not better coordinated. After writing two books with two additional co-authors each, I can testify that it is a difficult problem to solve. Still, better coordination could have helped. Five stars for the writing style and the concept. That's why this book is a smashing success.

Most people make the transition from C to C++ or to Java with little trouble, if any. If you look at their code, you'll understand why: People figure out clever ways to do C programming in any language -- No person, no discipline, no environment, and no programming language can FORCE you to program in an object oriented way if you really don't want to. So you don't, and you don't reap the benefits of object orientation either, even though you're using an object oriented language... This means your code is not factored properly, this means you don't have re-usable components, this means you don't get the orthogonality and modularity and reduction in program complexity that object orientation promisses. What would such a program look like? It look like hell! It turns out that people misuse object oriented technology in similar ways, forming not "patterns", but rather "AntiPatterns." The AntiPatterns book is like a pathology textbook for software engineering: It helps you identify projects gone awry, what were the basic reasons for the program to have developed the way it did, what are the consequences of such pathological development, and how to fix things. The idea is not to have to do a complete re-write, but to either isolate the working-but-malstructured parts of the program or fix them gently, a small piece at a time, or both. The book will also teach you how NOT to think about patterns and object orientation.

In 1994, a book was published that caused a mini-revolution in the field of software development. The book was _Design Patterns_ by Gamma et. al. Their approach was to describe software in terms of patterns, which are abstractions that are more general than a standard algorithm. Since that time, a small but growing band of individuals have made great progress in the codification and application of patterns. Preliminary indications are that properly understood, and it is problematic that anyone really does at this time, and applied patterns will have a substantial affect on software development. An antipattern is a pattern that has negative consequences when applied. This ranges from the antipattern that almost always leads to a negative consequence to those that are generally positive, but lead to negative results when used in the wrong context. One example is the Cut-and Paste Programming antipattern. We all have benefited from the use of cut and paste and we have all suffered when we used it in an inappropriate situation. Many such examples are given, and fortunately for us all, for each antipattern the authors provide instructions on how to recognize it, what causes it and how to cure it. Anyone who has worked in software development has experienced one or more of these problems. In keeping with a negative often being more significant than a positive, it is quite possible that the study of antipatterns will yield more substantial results than similar effort being expended elsewhere. That is why I included this book in my list of best books of the year that appeared in the September, 1999 issue of _Journal of Object-Oriented Programming_.

Perhaps the title of this book is unfortunate, given the fact that those who have posted bad reviews here seem to have expected it to be an extension of the GoF Design Patterns book. (In which case they would have been better off with the GoV A System of Patterns book.) All such expectations aside, however, this book is an enjoyable guide to project management that is well worth reading. As for the criticism that it is nothing more than common sense packaged as wisdom, I would argue that common sense is nothing more than applied wisdom, and the common sense this book aims to teach is sadly lacking in too many companies today (hence the existence and popularity of Dilbert).BTW, the reviewer who attributed the quote, "there is nothing new under the sun" to Shakespeare might be amused, given the nature of the quote itself, to find that it was originally written by Solomon (in Ecclesiastes 1:9), quite some time prior to Shakespeare! There is nothing new, indeed.

Well researched, methodically organized, and convincingly exposed. The book is an intelligent attempt at addressing software development project problems (categorized into Architectural, Developmental, and Managerial), identifying their root causes, and suggesting remedies. And the authors do so without being too philosophical nor prescriptive. If a "pattern" explicates a design approach that works in different contexts, an "antipattern" is a literary form describing a typical solution to a problem that generates decidedly negative consequences. By focusing on failures proactively ("two-thirds of all software projects encounter cost overruns in excess of 200%"), the book makes its readers mindful of the nature and consequences of every single decision in a software project. I relate to every insight in this book. A fantastic read and a permanent reference.