Rating: 

I had not been able to see "inversion of control" or
dynamic proxy before.

The authors should be congratulated for their development and explanation of the patterns. It
was the best, the very best pattern book, I have read.

Sorry, but I didn't really enjoy or find valuable the features such as the crosswords, guru, interviews etc. The cute photos and text to start the chapters such as 5 were good for a chuckle but not worth the space they took up. I skipped over much of the cute/hip/creative stuff. It must have taken a lot of work, but I don't think it was worth it. I focused on the text and the script annotations. What do the say, "No fluff, just stuff". That's my preference but then I am not an artist or an editor.

I liked the design principles and wonder if it
shouldn't be discussed upfront in chapter 1 and then reinforced in subsequent chapters.

I was very
disappointed with the cursory treatment given
to the "other" patterns in chapter 14/appendix.

The book seemed to run out of gas.
Chapters 11,12,13 were hard for me to get thru
and I had found myself eager to read and discover
in the previous chapters. As mentioned before,
the dynamic proxy was most helpful and the explantion of MVC2 clarified my understanding.

Chapter 4 was a heavy chapter. I need to go
back and reread the whole book, but I felt
that 4 was the toughest for me. I wondered
why the abstract factory wasn't presented first.

Some authors also discuss a "Null" Pattern but
that seemed to be viewed as a useful feature
or idiom but not really a pattern.

I hope my somewhat lengthy review might be helpful for a future edition. I got more out of this book than another computer related book in the past year.

I feel like I did after seeing " Lemony Snicket's...", Jim Carey was terrible and he got
in the way of the movie. I felt the "yucks" got in the way of an very good book