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Chapter 3. Common Design Patterns

The harder it is to see the design in the code, the harder it is to preserve it.

—Martin Fowler^[1]

^[1] Fowler, Martin. Refactoring:Improving the Design of Existing Code. Reading, MA:Addison-Wesley, 1999. Page 55.

In their book, Design Patterns, Erich Gamma and company (commonly known as the “Gang of Four” or GoF) propose that there are certain patterns in software design that expert developers regularly use and recognize in code written by others. Design Patterns seeks to formally catalog these patterns so that developers may benefit from them without spending years learning them the hard way—through experience alone. The idea is to promote the discussion of and research into software design patterns as a distinct ...