[osflash] Share the knowledge: Books

[Nicolas Cannasse]

> I just bought a book, and it's so fantastic that I thought I'd share it 
> with you guys:
> 
> 'Head First Design Patterns' by Freeman & Freeman (O'Reilly press).

I don't know exactly what I should think about Design Patterns. It's 
true they're in general good solutions to model the problems in a 
classic OO language with inheritance, but they are not so much useful in 
other kind of languages (for exemple Functional ones). This is mainly 
due to the fact that OO creates its own set of problems that are only 
partly answered by using Design Patterns.

The need for the programmer to constantly reuse these patterns create 
the "code bloat" pattern, also sometimes called the "Java disease" :) 
It's when your code grows faster in complexity and number of 
abstractions than it grows in number of features.

I guess that a better programming language should embed the most often 
used patterns so they become a lot more natural to use (for instance you 
will not have to learn them).

However I still think that OO design patterns are useful since they can 
bring some common vocabulary and methology where before everybody was 
using its own way of encoding objects relationships.

> Anyway..  Do you guys have any interesting books to recommend?

TAPL : http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/

A must read for language design and type system implementations. The 
first chapters on Lambda Calculus are quite easy to read, but in the end 
there's a more difficult topics.

Nicolas