I heard a lot of praise regarding this book, so I decided to buy it.



Overall it's a good book but I was kind of hoping for something more. The author does a lot of references to "Refactoring" by Martin Fowler and to THE Design Patterns book (Gamma ...). In my view this book is more like a "how to understand and utilize" those previous two books and might increase the understanding for when to apply design patterns and when to avoid it.



I'd say that the examples used in this book is very good and they certainly do feel like non-fabricated examples. The Author's reasoning to when and how to refactor code in the examples are well described and easy to follow.



I think that if you studied Design Patterns & Refactoring and had problems understanding when or how to utilize what you learned during those books, then this book might be something for you. This might also be interesting if you wonder how to (as the title suggest) refactor towards a pattern. However, I think that where this book fails is that in a lot of situations refactoring toward patterns is to overcomplicate a code base when there are much easier solutions at hand.



Finally I'd like to say that this is certainly a good book, however I wouldn't rate it as one of those "must read"-books.

I'd much rather recommend the following books:



Clean Code - Robert C. Martin

Refactoring - Martin Fowler

Design Patterns - 4 authors : Gamma ...

The Pragmatic Programmer - Andrew Hunt and David Thomas