Ah, we just wanted to make learning Design Patterns fun. It’s up to you if you choose to use them or not. I do think that having some knowledge about patterns and principles can help you. And of course we put in the disclaimers about over-reliance on patterns, we put it at the end so as not to discourage people before they even start!
Regarding the cover: we wanted to make design patterns accessible to women and show that women can code too. This is not a “sexual” cover, it’s a strong, fun woman. At least that’s the way I see it (as a woman). But obviously everyone will have their own opinion about that.
Sorry you didn’t like it! Head First is definitely not for everyone.
I love this book. It’s one of the best technical books I’ve read, it’s fun an far from dry. (maybe a little repetitive)
If you read a book and start using all of it without thinking you are stupid and it’s not the books fault IMO.
I don’t see the point of all the rant and negative comments here. Before denigrating the work of somebody you should read it attentively at least once and deduce that this different approach is beneficial because you don’t shove information into your head as you would normally do with other books. Their approach works really well by using redundant explanations and images… well, at least for me. If you are a senior programmer that already knows all paradigms and design patterns and just needs a good reference, then don’t read this book, but for us as junior programmers this comes in handy and, therefore, GoF can be considered a complement to it.
Was it really necessary to comment about the model in the cover? Oh, wow, two different clients bought the same stock picture… and one of them used the picture to illustrate some uniformed-shitty-text making girls feel bad about their anatomy.
Also, is being a stripper something bad or laughable? Do those comments serve for any purpose other than make women feel like we are less deserving human beings?
Please, please, please remove the tasteless commentary about the cover. I really doubt you want to have to explain this post to your daughters when one of them gets their first yeast infection.