For me, the canonical reference "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" continues to be the best book. But, it may be a bit dense for inexperienced developers. If that's your case, I suggest you read "Head-First Design Patterns" first. This book is more introductory and will help you understand the other book better.

You may also want to have a look at:

refactoring.guru/design-patterns

Thank You, I'll read both of the books. Mario Cervera

It's not easy, but you start to consider them more useful when you become very familiar with them (i.e. when you know them very intimately). At that point, you recognize them without effort, so code becomes more readable and intent-revealing (if it's has been written by someone who knows the patterns well, of course).

You also start to learn their trade-offs better, so you also know when not to apply them.

The learning process is slow, but definitely worth it 😊

Thanks Romain! 🙏

What you say about naming is true, but I am not saying that pattern names should appear in the code, and I am not talking about patterns from the GoF book only.

Pattern names are important during design discussions. For example, "dependency injection" is a pattern. Imagine that, during a design discussion, you have to explain to somebody else how to solve a problem applying dependency injection, but you cannot use this term. It would take much longer, wouldn't it?

That's the point about pattern names. They allow you to convey more information with less words.

Thanks Anshu! I am very happy to read this! 🙏

I think that the key point is that, when you learn about patterns, you do not only learn patterns. You gain much more!

That's why they are a good investment.

Thanks Maxi!

Yes, you are right. A long time has passed and that's why I think it makes sense to wonder whether design patterns are still relevant.

But, in this article, I wanted to talk about benefits of the very notion of 'design pattern', not necessarily the patterns that are described in the GoF book.

I am not sure that this is clear in the article, but I do mention the DDD book and also 'Dependency Injection', which is a design pattern that is clearly not from the GoF book.

Thanks Apoorv!

Yes, it's indeed a question. I run a poll in Twitter some time ago and 20% of the people voted 'No'.

That's a valid opinion, but I wanted to give an elaborate answer about why I believe otherwise.

Thanks for your kind words Matt! 🙏

Yes, exactly. Many people believe they are not relevant anymore because we have more advanced tools that make them unnecessary. But that's not true, in my opinion.

Patterns have plenty of benefits that are not so obvious, and I wanted to highlight them here 😊