More a bag of tricks to get around issues you tend to run into when doing OOP. Bridge comes to mind, I ran into that specific example myself trying to OO-desig

More a bag of tricks to get around issues you tend to run into when doing OOP. Bridge comes to mind, I ran into that specific example myself trying to OO-design a GUI framework with different back ends. With a pinch of common sense stuff like Facade etc. Much of it only makes sense for static languages such as C++ and Java. I'd say it gets way more credit than it deserves. Stepanov on OOP is interesting (just search for object oriented): http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html