Ellen,
I can recommend "Applied Java Patterns" (2002 Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-093538-7), which is in essence a Java port of the GoF book. The website is at
http://www.phptr.com/appliedjavapatterns/ I recently attended an all-day seminar given by Robert Martin, CEO of ObjectMentor.com, on the subject of Design Patterns. I asked him about how a novice should approach patterns. His response was basically that patterns books are best used as reference material, in combination with a significant amount of coding experience. It seemed that patterns are mostly useful as a way of communicating design elements and implemenation information among developers.
My take-away was that design patterns are not something that you can easily incorporate into your work until after you have an intuitive feel for them. This means being able to sit down with the GoF book and say, "Oh, I've done that before, but I didn't know it had a name."
This is not to say, don't read patterns books, but it may be a warning about applying patterns before you have experience with patterns.
It seemed a bit "chicken and egg" to me, but Robert has been an expert in this field for as long as there has been a field.
Anyway, I did get the "Applied Java Patterns" book, and I do thumb through it on occasion, but I don't go shopping for patterns to apply to my projects. I also got the Core
J2EE Patterns book from the same series, but I don't spend as much time with that one.
For what it's worth, I was able to gain a solid introduction to the MVC pattern in David Geary's "Advanced Java Server Pages".
PCS
[ November 05, 2002: Message edited by: Philip Shanks ]
