You know you don't want to reinvent the wheel (or worse, a flat tire), so you look to Design Patterns - the lessons learned by those who've faced the same problems. With Design Patterns, you get to take advantage of the best practices and experience of others, so that you can spend your time on...something else. Something more challenging. Something more complex. Something more fun. "Head First Design Patterns Poster" is a companion to "Head First Design Patterns". It summarizes visually, 16 of the most common design patterns including Adapter, Command, Composite Decorator, Observer, Proxy, State, Singleton, Strategy, and more. Each pattern includes a handy page reference to both "Head First Design Patterns" and the "Gang of Four" text, the canonical description of the pattern, and a visual guide designed (and inspired by the examples in "Head First Design Patterns") to jog your memory of the objects, classes and their relationships. In addition, the poster includes the "best of" the "Head First Guide to Better Living with Patterns," including how to read a patterns catalog, the power of a shared vocabulary and annihilating evil with anti-patterns. Visually appealing and truly useful, "Head First Design Patterns Poster" contains what you need to know at a glance. "Head First Design Patterns" and this companion poster are a great combination that will load patterns into your brain in a way that sticks.

Author Biography

Elisabeth Freeman is an author, software developer, and digital artist. She's been involved with the internet since the early days, having co-founded The Ada Project (TAP), an award-winning website for women in computing now adopted by the ACM. More recently, Elisabeth led research and development efforts in digital media at the Walt Disney Company, where she co-invented Motion, a content system that delivers terabytes of video every day to Disney, ESPN, and Movies.com users. Elisabeth is a computer scientist at heart and holds graduate degrees in Computer Science from Yale University and Indiana University. She's worked in a variety of areas including visual languages, RSS syndication, and internet systems. She is a coauthor of O'Reilly's Head First Design Patterns. She's also been an active advocate for women in computing, developing programs that encourage woman to enter the field. These days you'll find her sipping some Java or Cocoa on her Mac, although she dreams of a day when the whole world is using Scheme. Elisabeth has loved hiking and the outdoors since her days growing up in Scotland. When she's outdoors her camera is never far. She's also an avid cyclist, vegetarian, and animal lover. You can send her email at beth at wickedlysmart dot com . Eric Freeman is a computer scientist with a passion for media and software architectures and coauthor of Head First Design Patterns. He just wrapped up four years at a dream job-- directing internet broadband and wireless efforts at Disney--and is now back to writing, creating cool software, and hacking Java and Macs. Eric spent a lot of the '90s working on alternatives to the desktop metaphor with David Gelernter (and they're both still asking the question, "Why do I have to give a file a name?"). Based on this work, Eric landed a Ph.D. at Yale University in 1997. He also co-founded Mirror Worlds Technologies (now acquired) to create a commercial version of his thesis work, Lifestreams. In a previous life, Eric built software for networks and supercomputers. You might know him from such books as JavaSpaces Principles Patterns and Practice. Eric has fond memories of implementing tuple-space systems on Thinking Machine CM-5s and creating some of the first internet information systems for NASA in the late 1980s. When he's not writing text or code you'll find him spending more time tweaking than watching his home theater and trying to restore a circa 1980s Dragon's Lair video game. He also wouldn't mind moonlighting as an electronica DJ. Write to him at eric at wickedlysmart dot com or visit him at http://www.ericfreeman.com .