[PHPLondon-discuss] Can anyone recommend a good book on design patterns?

[Oliver Saunders]

> I would suggest "PHP|architect's Guide to PHP Design Patterns"

Not meaning to offend the author. But I didn't find that book very
good. In particular, the definition of Mock Objects actually confused
me more than helped me.

I'd recommend "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" By
Martin Fowler; Kent Beck; John Brant; William Opdyke; Don Roberts and
"Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" By Martin Fowler;
David Rice; Matthew Foemmel; Edward Hieatt; Robert Mee; Randy
Stafford. Both are really excellent, and refactoring is just utterly
essenial reading.

And then you'll find plenty of excellent tutorials on Design Patterns
on the Zend Developer Zone and the various Wikis dedicated to the
topic. I myself learnt design patterns with a book "Head's First
Design Patterns" (O'Reilly) which is a best-seller but I found it used
too many pages to explain relatively simple concepts and thus made
them seem more complicated than they actually were, but that could
very well just be me.

Finally there's Matt Zandstra's "Object Patterns and Practice" which I
imagine is very much like "PHP|architect's Guide to PHP Design
Patterns" with a bit more background and done better. I've not read
that book but his writings on Zend Developer Zone I've found to be
excellent.

Good luck.