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Comment by vsuperpower2020

I've read through this book 3 times over the years and it's very misguided. If you're working on a game and the words "gang of four" pop into your head you unfortunately have suffered permanent brain damage. The main problem with this book is that it focuses on things that are not actually issues for game development. Instead of deep knowledge you learn trivial factoids.

You don't need or want a service locator in most cases, but if you read a book like this you'll be trained that it's some necessary and integral part of game development. If you can figure out how to draw trees, you can also figure out how not to duplicate their mesh/texture 200 times with their "flyweight pattern". You almost certainly don't want a bytecode interpreter in your game. You shouldn't be thinking in terms of prototypes. The only useful "pattern" in the book is the singleton, and hedged with "Despite noble intentions, the Singleton pattern described by the Gang of Four usually does more harm than good.".

It teaches complete beginners to think incorrectly about how games should be developed, but it covers enough topics will entertain people. If you want a book, I would suggest "Game Engine Architecture" because it goes much more in depth on what actually goes into a game engine instead of abstract design patterns from textbooks that are somewhere between maliciously bad and incompetent.

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