Are people really giving this 5 stars
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I am kind of surprised that so many people have given this 5 stars. I don't think this book is very good and here are my reasons.
1- The book is written in a style that some people may not like, although this was not a problem for me. What did annoy me was the way they wrote the code bit by bit over many pages filled with a lot of people and pizzas in between. It means you can never use it as a quick reference as you have to search for the final correct piece of code.
2- There are no full code examples. Yes everything presented is in fragments, you will never see a complete piece of programme.
3- It uses Java, which looks like C# to all intents and purposes. But this stops them from displaying full code listings. The code itself is all over the place.
4- The book is definitely bloated with what seems quite a lot of unnecessary explanations and re-explanations.
5- I never felt they gave enough programming scenarios of the advantages of using the patterns, although there was a lot of talk.
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Fantastic
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A very good book. Its been written to be read from cover to cover and its a joy to do so. There are a lot of practice questions and task to do, which means you have to put the effort in but you will learn a lot.
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Not just for JAVA
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I am an ASP.NET developer and write in VB and C#. If you program in any OO language the fact that this book is written in Java will not be a problem in the slightest.
This book impressed me by the way it took you through implementations of the design patterns in order to help break the learning curve down into more manageable segments. After reading each chapter I knew exactly how the pattern was applied and understood it fully.
Something that was a real eye opener for me was that from reading this book I could see that design patterns exist EVERYWHERE in the .NET framework. User controls implements the composite pattern, the whole event driven model is based around the observer pattern and I don't know how many times I've been unknowingly using the template pattern!
There really shouldn't be any reason an OO programmer doesn't read this book (even if they are already clued up on their design patterns). It's an easy, fun and enlightening read.
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A really enjoyable read
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This has got to be the most enjoyable programming book I have ever read. Every spare minute I have is spent wanting to see what happens next. I have only ever felt this with novels before.
As to the content, I could relate many of the design patterns shown to what I have done or seen in the past, but they also show reasoning and extra detail and insight than what I have noticed myself.
A great read, I'm learning lots. I'm interested to see what the other Head First books are like now.
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Very clear
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Excellent book - very clear in putting the concepts across. Gradually builds towards understanding. Some repetition - but it works by re-enforcing the concepts. It's not often I read a technical book cover-to-cover.
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