What are some of the best books to learn object-oriented design principles and patterns?

Head First Design Patterns is one of those books that is a no brainer to hand to intermediate developers who are finding themselves cutting up against challenging design decisions within their applications. When I was in college and read portions of the Gang of Four's Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software I failed to fully understand the extent to which design patterns help make software manageable. Now patterns such as the Command, Strategy, and Factory have become indispensable tools to help us tackle complexity. Without design patterns we wouldn't have things like dependency injection. Patterns help us wrangle complexity and help us build cow paths that engineers of all levels can follow.

As for others and forgive my copyright infringement in only this post, "This is an extroverted book meant to bring you out of your introversion/reflection about the patterns you so like totally already knew." I'm sure that's a quote somewhere. It's a good book because if you only have your studies and the gang of four book with years of haggling over code writing efficiency, there are areas where you could grow, and basic cost analysis is one of them, also justifying the less efficient and sensical patterns you might never use yourself.

Design Pattern books should not be read in hurry (I mean a few days before interview is really a bad idea) and its waste of time mugging up the design patterns. Once a person understands the OOP concepts really well and spends a good amount of time programming, this book is great. Once a developer is comfortable with OOPs, design patterns can be seen organically growing in the codebase. Advice for beginners is to make your OOP concepts super clear and write lot of code and then go through this book "couple" of times. Happy Learning!

It's an OK book for beginners and readers who want a light reading. My memory of this book is that everything is written twice, which is why it is so big. To be fair, the GoF book can get quite repetitive and boring at times.

It is a good resource for any software developer, particularly those aspiring to improve their coding practices. Book focuses on: - clean, understandable, and maintainable code - writing less but more efficient code - practical advice to improve existing codebases - building craftsmanship in coding

This is indeed a seminal book, but I would not place it in the OO category at all. I'd encourage every developer to read this book because knowing and following its contents has a great impact on code quality. That said, there are other good books on clean code out there, so don't get stuck. Again, this is not a book on OO.

Reading and absorbing this - a fundamental reference - makes the Head First book utterly unnecessary. A better folliw-up would be to read the four Pattern Languages of Program Design books, and Kerievsky's Refactoring to Patterns.

If you are like me, you will have opinions already about when to use these patterns, but getting the theory into your reading and knowing what you already know is a big hit in a large, very well accepted book like this is a boost to your confidence. So, if you are a reflective programmer and find these patterns on your won you will not find the book useful, but if you need some theoretical backup, buy it, and you can walk into your office more self-assured. The C++ and Smalltalk is woefully outdated and not useful whatsoever.

You must have read this one. It's THE classic on patterns. By now, it's written in another era, and we know which patterns survived, and which ones did not. In 2024, you want to read this book as a classic, not as a primary source on OO design.

Must read for all the developers. It provides practical tips on how to effectively refactor the code without introducing bugs. This book shows you examples of bad code which looks perfectly fine in the first go; and then demonstrates what the problems are and how to fix them. MUST READ!

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code is a must-purchase for any developer looking to improve their code. When you find yourself frustrated with your IDE because some code doesn't quite feel right, but you don't know how to fix it, this is a sign that a refactor is needed. I've seen engineers who are terrified to modify existing code, partly because they didn't write tests, but another significant reason is that they didn't know how to refactor effectively. How often do you see an overly optimistic developer attempt to "clean up the code," only to submit a pull request riddled with bugs into the testing environment? Refactoring by Martin Fowler will help you navigate complex code changes without introducing bugs.

I've read both editions of this book; the first being in Java, the second in JavaScript. I agree with the others here on the fact that is one of the "must reads." As for the OO perspective... nah... Both editions sometimes refer to some OO concepts, like when replacing switch statements with polymorphism, but recommending "Refactoring" as a book on OO is far fetched.

I've only skimmed through this book, but I can say this: It's from the UML era, it contains a lot of examples, and lots of theory/background discussions on fundamental OO concepts. That said, it's not as heavy as Bertrand Meyer's brick. Out of the five books listed in this topic, I'd definitively go for this one. No doubt. The design patterns books assume knowledge of OO, and "Clean Code" and "Refactoring" are about working with source code on a more mechanical level.

Evans' Domain-Driven Design deserves a look-in here, as does Wirfs-Brock's Object Design, both of which are more recent and in my experience better than the Booch reference, which is very much of its time.