Have you read all of those great pattern books for programmers? Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Design Patterns, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, The Joy of Cooking, and more. James has and while that probably says some creepy things about what he means by, “curling up with a good book,” it’s also handy at times.

Lets face it, there are a ton of patterns. Some of them are pretty obscure and rare. Some of them really help though. When you hit the “Ah ha” moment with these special few, you are forever changed as a programmer.

Did you know Composed Method doesn’t just help you write smaller methods, but it can actually tell you what belongs in them too? I think most of us have learned that using super is usually better than monkey patching, but do you know that boring old Template Method is often better still? Did you know that designing a simple State Machine is most of the battle in building a Buzzword Bingo compliant Hypermedia API?

There are two ways you can cram all of this not-so-ancient wisdom into your head: read half the Internet or come to this talk. Choose wisely!