Anti-patterns Reviews

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  Crucial support for developers, architects,

  Nicholas Sales | Dec 20, 2004

  Reviews for "Patterns" books always seem to be highly polarised - "buy it!"/"burn it!".
  So, let's be clear about (my opinion of) the purpose of Patterns: it is to generalise just enough to be identifiable & helpful.
  This book does that, and uniquely, does it at 3 levels of applicability: so it has help for coders, architects and managers.
  The best unique feature is that it helps you decide what NOT to do - a critically important decision! (And how to back-pedal if it's too late...)
  Whichever of the roles above you hold, and especially if you've moved between them, this book will give you helpful perspectives on fixing problems you and your colleagues will meet in organisations of 1 or more people.

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  Hard Work and not worth the money

  Richard I Urwin | Jan 13, 2003

  The patterns start in chapter five. Ignore the rest of the book on pain of absolute boredom. For example chapter two (32 pages) defines the keywords to be used in catagorising the patterns. Chapter three (9 pages) defines all the ways that patterns are ever written up, probably in order to justify changing it in this book. I notice that most or all the good reviews are by management and consultants, so maybe it works better for them, but I found the engineering antipatterns too few in number and too obvious in solution. Instead try Deathmarch Projects, Writing Solid Code, and Debugging the Development Process. They don't have the magic word "pattern" in the titles, but they're a lot more use.

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  DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!

  Aug 12, 2001

  The material in this book is unbelievably superficial and reeks of the authors' pretentiousness. It is referenced frequently in the pattern literature, but don't go anywhere near it. If you think taking two pages to explain that confrontational e-mails are bad constitutes a 'pattern' then go right ahead. Otherwise, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!

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  An enjoyable, usable guide to project management

  Aug 20, 1999

  Perhaps the title of this book is unfortunate, given the fact that those who have posted bad reviews here seem to have expected it to be an extension of the GoF Design Patterns book. (In which case they would have been better off with the GoV A System of Patterns book.) All such expectations aside, however, this book is an enjoyable guide to project management that is well worth reading. As for the criticism that it is nothing more than common sense packaged as wisdom, I would argue that common sense is nothing more than applied wisdom, and the common sense this book aims to teach is sadly lacking in too many companies today (hence the existence and popularity of Dilbert).

  BTW, the reviewer who attributed the quote, "there is nothing new under the sun" to Shakespeare might be amused, given the nature of the quote itself, to find that it was originally written by Solomon (in Ecclesiastes 1:9), quite some time prior to Shakespeare! There is nothing new, indeed.

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  A poor imitation trying to coattail on "Design

  Jul 7, 1999

  This book tries to follow on the success of the wonderful book Design Patterns (Gamma, et. al.) but fails miserably. It's been said in other reviews that this is "common sense packaged as wisdom", and this is not far from the mark.

  While some of the anti-patterns are mildly useful -- particularly the ones specifically related to software development itself -- the ones related to project management are so obvious and general that all but the novice will roll his or her eyes back with disbelief that these could be included in a software engineering book.

  For instance, the "Corncob Pattern" is a difficult person who causes problems through destructive behaviors and how to work around him or her. It's true that we all run into people like this, but this is supposed to be a book at least _somewhat_ related to software.

  They have three patterns that essentially deal with overplanning ("Analysis Paralysis", "Death by Planning", and "Design by Committee"), and while I suppose these are possible, too little planning is much more likely to cause project debacle than too much. In fairness, they do have a not-enough-planning pattern, "Architecture by Implication", though this deals with architecture and not requirements.

  Believe it or not, "Irrational Managment" is a "pattern" in an engineering book that discusses what to do if your boss is the problem. This seems to be a topic best left to Dr. Laura, in "Ten Stupid Things Managers Do To Mess Up Your Project".

  I was unfortunate enough to read "Anti-Patterns" before "Design Patterns", and the poor quality of the former nearly kept me from reading the latter. These books are simply not in the same league, and some might say not even in the same industry.

  Avoid this book unless you have very little real-world experience in the software business.

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