Patterns Everywhere...
I'm about 50 pages into The Gang of Four's Design Patterns. I've been reading about design patterns since I finished Agile Software Development recently. The COMPOSITE pattern has been one of my favorites, but I didn't really understand how prevalent it was until last night. I'd mainly considered the use that Robert Martin gave it in his book--the COMPOSITE COMMAND pattern. The GoF use a word-processor to illustrate the concept so you can see it much more broadly. The Range Object in MS Word and MS Excel are both COMPOSITE objects!
This is great--the patterns are starting to Gel for me, and I'm beginning to see coding structures as relations of patterns instead of relations of simple objects. This is going to radically improve my design skills. I feel like Luke Skywalker when Obi Wan says "you have taken your first steps into a larger world."
If you haven't read these two books, I highly suggest that you do.