I'm sick today, so I spent sometime looking at some OOP patterns (isn't that what you do when you're sick?)
I found this website a while back. I had looked at the factory patterns before, and had been trying to think through the when angle of these. Some of these patterns it is suggested that you should use these frequently, and since I have never built a factory pattern, this has added to my already lower self-esteem as a programmer (I know I'm good, but I want to be "733t" like Brendan and Darrell and Sahil and Geoff and Eric and John and uhh, you get the idea...
What spawned all this is that I've recently been put on a different team at work... I won't totally explain here, but this has left me feeling a little less appreciated at work (read "disrespected") and have felt that maybe I'm just a Mort pretender.
So today I got past the Abstract Factory, Builder, and Factory patterns... When I got to the Singleton pattern I realized that I could probably very easily refactor some existing code into this pattern (and it actually makes sense to do so).
When I got to the structural patterns, I discovered that just last week I built some code using the composite pattern. I didn't even know it. It was just the most logical choice for what I was doing (WebDAV with Exchange)...
Cool! Either I'm not a total Mort or there's hope for me yet!
I'm still reading (DonXML caused me to take a side step and research Domain Driven Design... thanks Don... I don't totally get it, but I think I need to bite the bullet and read both Martin's book, and Eric's DDD book).