Design patterns are an interesting concept in that you may have used a few of them without ever knowing it! I know some of the coding examples that I’ve seen have been pretty familiar to codes I’ve created and studied before. As the title above states, design patterns were simply created to be typical solutions to common problems that software engineers might face.
The foundation set of 23 design patterns can be referred to as the Gang of Four patterns. They are referred to as such because the design patterns can be found in a book which was authored by four separate authors– “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” . The Gang of Four patterns are not only important to recognize as solutions but also to understand how they avoid the pitfall that each pattern was created to avoid. Your first question when looking at a design pattern for the first time shouldn’t necessarily be “How does this pattern work? but instead “What problem prompted the creation of this?”
The Gang of Four patterns are separated into three categories:
- Behavioral – patterns which lay out the way that classes and objects should communicate
- Creational – patterns which give ways to instantiate objects or groups of objects
define manners of communication between classes and objects. - Structural – patterns which give a framework to define relationships between classes or objects
Aaaand that’s a general overview of the Gang of Four design patterns! For more information you can see the following sites. I’ll be writing a few blogs dedicated to some specific design patterns soon as well, so keep an eye out!
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