Design Patterrns

Woohoo! My Design Patterns book finally got here, now I really can cringe as I read page after page of why my designs the past year have been so poor. Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates from Javaranch put togehter an "Everything You Need to Know" guide to the most common software design patterns. So far I am overly impressed with Kathy and Bert's approaches of explaining potentially dry material in a new and interesting way. I stil consider myself very new to the field of software development, and for architecture I am a mere infant, but I am easily excited when discovering general theories that can be applied to development. Thanks to Kathy and Bert I am building my "Shared Vocabulary" that I can use to communicate effectively in the field. Like a lot of other beginning programmer's I admit I believed an OO view of the world would solve all problems, but I didn't see the dangers and design traps until I began on larger more involved projects. These Design patterns really help to identify areas where a strictly OO solution is not necessarily the best decision and the less intuitive albeit better designs have been passed down and proven successful by many senior developer across a wide array of projects.