When I first read the gang of four’s Design Patterns I dismissed most of it as a coverup for the unfortunate parts of C++’s object design. That was definitely unfair, since the strongest benefits of Design Patterns come from managing huge code bases, a fact that I missed with all the small examples. But even still, I would love a book on design patterns that is built for modern interpreted languages, with duck-typing and no type checking.

The greatest problem in learning object oriented design is in the toy problems. The object oriented solution never looks better than the regular solution.

Learn the right way to write a program the wrong way

It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that New York taxes were managed by a handful of programmers. But most programmers would be scared to learn how much of it was done in Perl.