Anthony Ferrara has written up a new post that looks beyond design patterns. He suggests that more emphasis should be put on learning proper methods for abstraction and communication between objects and structures.

Many people teach design patterns as a fundamental step to Object Oriented Programming. They are so universally seen as important that almost every single conference that I have been to has had at least one talk about them. They are quite often used as interview questions to test a candidate's OOP knowledge. However, just like inheritance, they are not needed for OOP. And just like inheritance, they are a distraction rather than a foundation. Instead of focusing on patterns, I suggest focusing on learning about abstraction and communication.

He briefly covers the three types of patterns most people are introduced to - creational, structural and behavioral - and his suggestions of other patterns that answer more of the "what the problem is" question:

• Shim patterns (Flyweight, Iterator, etc)
• Compositional patterns (Adapter, Builder, Facade, etc)
• Decompositional patterns (Bridge, Command, Mediator, etc)

He spends some time later in the post looking a bit more closely at four specific patterns, Adapter, Bridge, Facade and Proxy. He points out that they (essentially) do the same kind of thing and boils it down to a more refined set of implementation patterns and the problems they help solve.