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Under review

Idea for a new book on design patterns

Jules Manson 5 years ago updated by anonymous 5 years ago 1

I have an idea for a GoF Design Patterns spin-off. A good suggested name might be:

Design Patterns II

Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented and Functional Javascript

(Spinoff greatly inspired by Gang-of-Four Design Patterns)

Inspired by original GoF Design Patterns a 2nd edition would cite all original 23 design patterns employing primarily only Vanilla to Neapolitan flavored JavaScript. Where Javascript examples are not appropriate related web development languages may be cited for example CSS variables or serverless databases. A pro edition would also be available for other patterns which are commonly used or most important including the first 23 perhaps a total of 32 in all. Abstract to concrete real world practical use cases would be cited so that developers could immediately put them to work in their projects with very limited modifications needed. A free public accessible repository (for example GitHub or CodePen) with live code would be available for developers to run through exercises or quickly download code.

New edition would make very limited use of jQuery. Examples of in-the-wild popular libraries/frameworks would cite instances where they did it right and where they went wrong. Not a single use of the non-words foo and bar are printed anywhere in the book as such abstractions are so bland and meaningless that novice programmers often have difficulty grasping the core lessons behind them -- novice programmers like me.

Several outstanding books have already been written for example Learning JavaScript Design Patterns (Volume 1.7.0 is completely free online) by Addy Osmani. But the examples are too bland for me. He should have made use of more real-world examples especially from frameworks. There is also a great website called REFACTORING GURU giving one a taste of design patterns (also inspired by GoF) or the full guru book for a small price but he uses cats and other dumb real-world objects to demonstrate use-cases in UML or Java. UML is too much of an abstraction and I have never used Java not will I ever have a need to learn Java. Beginners to intermediate programmers need real-world example to really grasp the core ideas.

My programming skills are far too low to write/co-write or technically review such a book. But if said book were to be published l would be near the top of a very long list to acquire an initial beta release. I just wanted to throw that out there to get your thoughts.

What do you all think of this idea?

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Under review

Hi Jules!

Thanks for the idea. I see you put a lot of effort into describing it.


The immediate feedback I might give you is that you'll probably need to change the title unless you want to be sued by the GoF publisher.

Frankly, I'm not sure whether I like it or not. I envision you'll have a pretty hard time writing all of the examples in JavaSscript due to some patterns just not as relevant in JS. I can also say that writing a book is more of a balancing act, where more content is not always better for everyone, especially nowadays, when people 1) don't have a lot of free time on their hands 2) have a lot of other options to spend that time.


Anyway, I'd advise you exploring your idea in details. Write some of those examples yourself, see whether they are any good. If so, keep writing and one day you might end up with a nice book you'll be proud of.