Design Patterns

[Design Pattern Catalog]

Thank you for your interest in "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable
Object-Oriented Design", by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson,
and John Vlissides.  This message answers several frequently asked
questions.

If you thought you were asking for the source code, you must have
made a mistake.  Please try again!

The "pattern home page", with all this information and more, is at
http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/users/patterns/patterns.html
You can get the source code from there, too.

There are several mailing lists dealing with patterns.  
gang-of-4-patterns at cs.uiuc.edu is about the design patterns in our book.
If you've got any questions about our patterns, please ask them there.
For example, post errata there, or questions about how to implement
Singleton.

patterns-discussion at cs.uiuc.edu is for discussing patterns in general,
i.e. for discussing how to find patterns, how to organize them, or the
meaning of patterns, but not necessarily about particular patterns.
It is pretty busy.

patterns at cs.uiuc.edu is a place for presenting and describing software
patterns. This is where you learn about new patterns.  They don't have
to be object-oriented or design patterns, though most of them are.  
It is not very busy, so it won't flood your mailbox.

To subscribe to these, send e-mail to gang-of-4-patterns-request at cs.uiuc.edu,
patterns-request at cs.uiuc.edu, or patterns-discussion-request at cs.uiuc.edu 
with the subject of "subscribe".  Or, go to the patterns home page
and see the page on mailing lists, which describes a bunch more and
will automatically subscribe you.

If you want permission to copy something from the book, you need to
talk to Addison-Wesley, not us.  Addison-Wesley has a copyright
department.  They will either just let you do it or charge you a
small fee.  If you are just copying a few pages for a few people,
then it falls under "fair use" and is OK.  I don't know what the limit
is, though.

There is an archive of pattern-related material available by anonymous
ftp from st.cs.uiuc.edu in /pub/patterns.  In particular, the source
code for our book is in /pub/patterns/dpcat.  Try that if the mailer
isn't returning the source code for you.  It acts up a lot.

If none of these solves your problem, you can send e-mail to
johnson at cs.uiuc.edu.  Otherwise, it might be a few months before
your message is read.

-Ralph