Brief Note

Design patterns in programming are reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software design and development. They are established best practices that provide a way to solve specific design challenges and improve the structure, efficiency, and maintainability of software systems.

These general, abstract concepts can be applied across different programming languages and domains and provide a common language for developers to communicate and share their solutions. Design patterns help address issues such as code organization, flexibility, extensibility, and reusability. They promote modular and loosely coupled code, making modifying, maintaining, and testing software systems easier.

By leveraging design patterns, developers can benefit from proven solutions and established best practices, leading to more efficient and maintainable code. However, applying design patterns judiciously, considering the project’s requirements and constraints, is important because overusing patterns can lead to unnecessary complexity.

In keeping with the trend of avoiding unnecessary complexity, this chapter will avoid going through every known design pattern out there because that would be both extremely verbose and unnecessary. Many learnings on design patterns will come with time and experience writing production-grade code at scale. While we have already used some design patterns in this course, the focus of this chapter will be to talk about some of the most popularly used and well-known creational and structural patterns and avoid diving too deep into behavioral patterns because the latter can get a bit vague without specific use cases to illustrate their benefits.