Designing with Objects: Object–Oriented Design Patterns Explained with Stories from Harry Potter

Here is a book that takes the sting out of learning object–oriented design patterns! Using vignettes from the world of Harry Potter, author Avinash Kak provides a refreshing alternative to the typically abstract and dry object–oriented design literature. Designing with Objects is unique in that it explains design patterns via the short story medium, instead of with sterile examples. It is the third in a trilogy of books by Avinash C. Kak, following Programming with Objects (Wiley, 2003) and Scripting with Objects (Wiley, 2008). Designing with Objects begins with a discussion about the difficulty of understanding the more complex patterns through the more conventional explanations that draw on applications scenarios that a student may not be able to connect with.  This serves as a motivation for basing the explanations on stories from Harry Potter.  After explaining the core notions in a pattern and stating how a pattern is typically used in real–world applications, each chapter goes into how a pattern can be mapped to a Harry Potter story.  That discussion serves as the basis for explaining the pattern through its Java implementation. The book presents the following patterns: Abstract Factory, Builder, Factory Method, Prototype, and Singleton; Adapter, Bridge, Composite, Decorator, Facade, Flyweight, and Proxy; and the Chain of Responsibility, Command, Interpreter, Iterator, Mediator, Memento, Observer, State, Strategy, Template Method, and Visitor patterns. Java code for each pattern is included for readers’ use in the book companion site. All code examples in the book are available for download on a companion site with resources for readers and instructors A refreshing alternative to the rather abstract and dry explanations of the object–oriented design patterns in much of the existing literature on the subject In 24 chapters, Designing with Objects explains well–known design patterns by relating them to stories from the Harry Potter series  

Avinash C. Kak is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. His areas of interest include software engineering, computer and network security, sensor networks, and computer vision (especially with camera networks). Professor Kak has been awarded numerous Best Teacher of the Year awards at Purdue University. He is the author of  Scripting with Objects  and  Programming with Objects , both published by Wiley.