Design Patterns

Has Already Been Solved
In This Chapter
Introducing design patterns
Knowing how design patterns can help
Extending object-oriented programming
Taking a look at some specific design patterns
A
s a programmer, you know how easy it can be to get lost in the details
of what you're doing. And when you lose the overview, you don't plan
effectively, and you lose the bigger picture. When that happens, the code
you're writing in the trenches ends up working fine for a while, but unless
you understand the bigger picture, that code really is a specialized solution
to a particular problem.
And the heck of it is that problems rarely stay solved after you've handled
them once. Developers typically regard their work as tackling individual
problems by writing code and solving those problems. But the truth is that in
any professional environment, developers almost always end up spending a
lot more time on maintenance and adapting code to new situations than writ-
ing entirely new code.
So if you consider it, it doesn't make sense to think in terms of Band-Aid fixes
to remedy the problems you face because you'll end up spending a great deal
of time putting out fires and trying to extend code written for a specific prob-
lem so that it can handle other cases as well. It makes more sense to get a
little overview on the process of code design and maintenance.