Design Patterns

Design Patterns

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software is a software engineering book describing recurring solutions to common problems in software design. The book's authors are Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides with a foreword by Grady Booch. The authors are often referred to as the Gang of Four, or GoF. 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.

The original publication date of the book was October 21, 1994 with a 1995 copyright, and as of March 2011, the book was in its 39th printing. The book was first made available to the public at OOPSLA meeting held in Portland, Oregon, in October 1994. It has been highly 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.