Author | The "Gang of Four": Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides |
---|---|
Country | USA |
Subject | Design patterns, software engineering, object-oriented programming |
Publisher | Addison-Wesley |
Publication date
|
1994 |
Pages | 395 |
ISBN | |
OCLC | 31171684 |
005.1/2 20 | |
LC Class | QA76.64 .D47 1995 |
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software is a software engineering book describing software design patterns. The book's authors are Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides with a foreword by Grady Booch. The book is divided into two parts, with the first two chapters exploring the capabilities and pitfalls of object-oriented programming, and the remaining chapters describing 23 classic software design patterns. The book includes examples in C++ and Smalltalk.
It has been influential to the field of software engineering and is regarded as an important source for object-oriented design theory and practice. More than 500,000 copies have been sold in English and in 13 other languages. The authors are often referred to as the Gang of Four (GoF).
The book started at a birds of a feather (BoF) session at OOPSLA '90, "Towards an Architecture Handbook", run by Bruce Anderson, where Erich Gamma and Richard Helm met and discovered their common interest. They were later joined by Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides. The original publication date of the book was October 21, 1994 with a 1995 copyright, hence it is often cited with a 1995-year, despite being published in 1994. The book was first made available to the public at the OOPSLA meeting held in Portland, Oregon, in October 1994. In 2005 the ACM SIGPLAN awarded that year's Programming Languages Achievement Award to the authors, in recognition of the impact of their work "on programming practice and programming language design". As of March 2012, the book was in its 40th printing.
Chapter 1 is a discussion of object-oriented design techniques, based on the authors' experience, which they believe would lead to good object-oriented software design, including:
The authors claim the following as advantages of interfaces over implementation: