How to learn Design Patterns
How I did it: I read the book Head First Design Patterns by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Freeman, paying detailed attention, taking copious notes and doing most of the exercises provided. I then copied out my notes into a (long) Word document, reviewing them again as I went.
Resources: Head First Design Patterns by Eric Freeman & Elisabeth Freeman.
If you want to learn design patterns I'd be surprised if you could do better than this book - on Amazon.co.uk just now it has the almost unique property of averaging the full 5 stars over 38 (!) user reviews. It's very thick, but don't let that put you off - it's much more readable and friendly than your standard computing textbook. I'll keep it by my side.
The only thing to note about it is it only properly covers 14 of the 23 Gang of Four design patterns - you'll have to read up on the others yourself. I found that having gone through the book I was confident enough to do this via the web - this website is particularly useful.
For what it's worth, I've read numerous accounts of the original 'classic' Gang of Four design patterns book being extremely hard work. This book proves it doesn't have to be.
