Object-Oriented Design & Patterns

Reviewer: Dr. Alexander Yakhnis, [email protected] I like the book and have taught Spring 2004 Object-oriented Development (CSC 429 ) course at SUNY College at Brockport, New York. I have taught the material from Chapter I through 6. I have also used the material from Ch. 8 Object-Oriented Frameworks for 2 Independent Study Courses with 2 students during Summer 2004. I find chapters 4 and 5 the best hands on introduction to Design Patterns that makes the corresponding material of The Gang of Four book quite understandable and it is better by far than many other attempts to introduce design patterns. The author plays to an advantage the use of Java and its libraries already based on some of the design patterns that many other authors have not exploited despite existence of Design Patterns presented in Java. I also find the choice of 5 patterns: Iterator, Strategy, Observer, Composite and Decorator very tasteful as well as very useful. The author's problem examples illustrating the use of design patterns, particularly, the Invoice example is excellent. The material in Ch. 4 on Interface Types leads to design patterns gracefully, and one can obviously recognize Strategy patter playing important role unnamed yet. This looks to me a good arrangement. Exercises reinforce the ideas very well. If some more exercises will be added that would be a nice improvement. The author succeeds in making clear the concept of Object-Oriented Frameworks in introductory textbook. Separation of a framework and applications built on it is very well presented. Use of sequence diagrams helps to understand OO Framework. I would suggest that the concept of a Use Case and collaboration diagrams as alternative to sequence diagrams helps to get into the heart of how a framework achieves a goal relevant to a user. An excellent example of such a goal is presented in Ch. 8 for the Graph Framework. When I was teaching the course I have attempted to replace The Object-Oriented Design Process from Ch. 2 by elements of Craig Larman textbook Applying UML and Patterns (Completely different patterns there than the 5 mentioned above). It helped me to reinforce software engineering concepts taught by Craig Larman that I have taught in software engineering course and also provided good point of view for understanding the OO Frameworks where some of the goals served by an OO Framework are viewed as Use Cases. I would use the book again for CSC 429 Object-Oriented Development without hesitation should I be teaching this course again. Also, I continue to use OO Design and Patterns as a source of material for Independent Studies. Finally, I congratulate the author for making available and understandable the concept of Design Patterns as practical way of building OO software at undergraduate level.

OK, in spite of the fact that I develop in C# versus Java and the price is steep, I still think this is a great purchase. Horstmann provides an insightful introduction into serious software development. The book provides a lot of detail that is aimed at increasing your understanding of the language (or related languages) versus simply conveying languge semantics. His introduction to patterns is fairly light (I'd recommend Metsker's "Design Patterns in C#") but solid enough. Although in many respects the material was "refresher" stuff, the prose was entertaining and I found myself picking the book up time and time again just to read a few pages.

The previous reviewer sounds like he is looking for an all in one reference. Indeed, if you are a professional programmer and need a reference book, this one is not for you. However, if you're a student, new to OO programming/design or just want to add to your programming knowledge, this is a perfect book. It's designed for the classroom first (see the preface and exercises!), but is also useful for anyone who learned to program in C++ or Java and wants more sophisticated OO coverage. It is certainly not intended to teach the entire language. Rather, it assumes you already know how to program and want to learn more about Object-Oriented Design, including UML and design patterns. This is an important topic and it's never been introduced in a clearer, more intersting way than it is in this book.

This is my textbook from the OOD course I am currently taking with Dr. Horstmann. The course along with the text has completely transform the way I think about programming in general. The book teaches OOD Design process in the first few chapters and goes into more in-depth focusing on Design Patterns and using the JAVA API to illustrate them. I also have the classic "Gang of 4" Design Pattern text, which I had tried to read with no avail before. For a novice programmer, without enouogh programming experience, one does not appreciate the utilities of the Design Patterns. In Horstmann's text, he poses interesting programming tasks, and solves them by using design patterns. This provides a context that a novice programmer can appreciate and learn from. He also references other texts, and tools to help you get more information. The book is not meant to be an in-depth study of any particular topics, but rather, it interwovens many important concepts of medium level difficulty and present a rich and entertaining view on the subject. This is excellent text for a second or third course on programming.