Here's what I'm doing to learn Design Patterns

Vincent Cavanna — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 04:46:02 +0000

Design Patterns are everywhere. Or so my boss tells me. While you can go overboard with them, they do wonders in simplifying the steaming hot pile of crap that I wrote a year ago. So this is me writing about how I am going to learn design patterns.

To start, I want to use the Gang of 4 book, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Amazon link here, not an affiliated link). This book is widely considered one of the essential books on design for Object Oriented Programming. Just ask Martin Fowler, author and international speaker on software development:

In my view the Gang of Four is the best book ever written on object-oriented design - possibly of any style of design. This book has been enormously influential on the software industry.

On the same page he also mentions that it's not an easy book to read, but "unlike most books, however, it amply pays that investment.

So what is my approach? After doing a very simple skim of this book, I like one of the approaches suggested by the authors, which is to follow a problem-focused approach rather than a pattern approach... more on that later.

Follow along if you like! I'll be writing examples in C++ to help me improve my understanding of the language. Just know that this is me struggling to understand a new language.

DEV Community: Vincent Cavanna

Here's what I'm doing to learn Design Patterns