UML & Design Patterns - advice needed

[ubu]

Can anyone recommend any good books or training courses for someone trying to get a good understanding of UML, Design Patterns and OO design?

I've written tons of code in C#, Java (a few years ago) and even some OO Perl without ever really getting a proper grounding in the underlying principles of good OO design. I came into the OO world kinda backwards and jumped straight into solving real world problems (designing/writing a dbms-agnostic data access layer for an existing J2EE framework) without the luxury of any formal training. So I sometimes have difficulty communicating design ideas (and even understanding some of the discussions in this forum :confused: ). I think it's time I got my act together and "went back to basics" so any advice would be very much appreciated.

This post probably belongs in the General Discussion forum but, since it's fellow developers I need help from, I'm sticking it here.

[sub]

I learnt UML on the job so dont have a book recommendation, but any new UML book off amazon with a decent rating should give you the basics.

I would suggest not trying to learn everything about UML, the reality is that you'll never use most of it. I've worked in several places that have standardized on UML, but this typically means knowning how to read and create UML class diagrams and sequence diagrams.

When I went through this several years ago myself, the stand bible that most people got for a good introduction to deisgn patterns was the 'gang of four' book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201633...e&n=283155, which gives a pretty decent introduction to the concepts. This book describes many design patterns that you'll be familiar with but didnt know it (factory patterns etc), a few that will be new to use but useful, and several more obscure ones that you'll probably never use.

[ubu]

Thanks for the advice. I'd looked at the "gang of four" book, which is clearly design patterns "from the horse's mouth", but was a bit put off by the price. Wondered if there was a cheapo book that covered the essentials (a la Nutshell books) but since you recommend it I should probably score a copy.

I take your point about using design patterns without knowing it. I'm pretty sure I'm using factory, singleton and observer patterns. Since I've done a bit of web services stuff, I guess I've used proxies too, but I'm still trying to get my head around those (hence the need for a book).

There's about a million books on UML out there so, if nobody else has a favourite to tell me about, I guess I'll just pick one at random.

I wish I was learning this "on the job". I did that, back in the day, with structured analysis and design (Yourdon, Gane and Sarson, that kind of thing) and with relational data modelling/db design. It's a little easier when you learn something and immediately put it into practice. You certainly get to learn from your own mistakes and there's usually somebody around who will delight in pointing them out to you . Now I'm finding that I need to learn this stuff just to get a job. Just writing well-documented code that works doesn't seem to hack it any more .

[stryder]

The Sun site has a great section on design patterns with there Blueprint solutions catalog, see

http://java.sun.com/blueprints/corej2eep...index.html

It is geared to J2EE development but gives a good explanation of what each pattern is attempting to achieve, all patterns are based on 'The Gang of Four'

Another book a colleague of mine has been raving about is Head First Design Patterns
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/05960...e&n=266239

Hope this helps.