Design patterns fill a similar niche as recipes. You have learned the fundamentals, control flow, data structures, algos, etc, but you are t sure how to put tha

Design patterns fill a similar niche as recipes. You have learned the fundamentals, control flow, data structures, algos, etc, but you are t sure how to put that all together. After learning the fundamentals of cooking, you can start exploring different recipes. Most of them are instructional and assume a base level of knowledge like what golden brown or finely diced means. They let you use your skills to make something physical. Design patterns fill a similar niche, somewhere between abstract concept and concrete code. What differs is that most recipes can be made without prior dependency. You can make chicken for dinner no matter what you made before. Large software projects aren’t like that. When deciding what to do you have to consider what you and your coworkers made for every previous meal. This makes a recipe much harder to choose, and often ends up as square peg/round hole. On the flip side most people start with recipes and only after much trial and error so they learn how to cook.