Getting my head in the game

So I just got a copy of Head First Design Patterns, an O’reilly book by Eric & Elisabeth Freeman (and apparently Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates). As I’m looking at this thing I’m actually quite excited to read it. I’ve had a pretty basic grasp of design patterns over the years (and made some minimal use of the factory pattern). The time has come, however, to firm up that knowledge and get comfortable with it.

SO, in an effort to keep myself motivated I’m going to blog about it as I go (maybe this will turn me into a blogger…doubtful). For some background, I’ve been developing heavily with PHP since 2003. Almost all of my work is database driven (at least anything large enough to take note of), and I do everything as OO as possible. I’m in the process of re-learning Symfony, whole-heartedly embracing git, and tweaking everything little thing I do to make it better. That all being said, I don’t consider myself a PHP God….more of a guy with a PHP fetish. I love the language, love how its grown and morphed, etc.

Already, enough boring preamble. On to the book review.

Preamble
It looks like the writers have mostly Computer Science backgrounds, with a Java bias.  This should work well, as it will give me something to write about (applying all this crap to PHP).

From the TOC it looks like the major patterns focused on in the book are:

• The Observer Pattern
• The Decorator Pattern
• The Factory Pattern
• The Singleton Pattern
• The Command Pattern
• The Adapter and Facade Patterns
• The Template Method Pattern
• The Iterator and Composite Patterns
• The State Patterns
• The Proxy Pattern
• Compound Patterns

First impressions?  Maybe I don’t know as many patterns as I thought.  First 4 patterns on this list I have a basic knowledge of.  The rest?  No clue.  Looking forward to this book even more now.