The book was written by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, with a foreword by Grady Booch.

It has been influential to the field of software engineering and is regarded as an important source for object-oriented design theory and practice.

[2][3][4][5] The book started at a birds-of-a-feather session at the 1990 OOPSLA meeting, "Towards an Architecture Handbook", where Erich Gamma and Richard Helm met and discovered their common interest.

[6] The book was originally published on 21 October 1994, with a 1995 copyright, and was made available to the public at the 1994 OOPSLA meeting.

Furthermore, they claim that a way to avoid this is to inherit only from abstract classes—but then, they point out that there is minimal code reuse.

The authors also discuss so-called parameterized types, which are also known as generics (Ada, Eiffel, Java, C#, Visual Basic (.NET), and Delphi) or templates (C++).

Acquaintance is a weaker relationship than aggregation and suggests much looser coupling between objects, which can often be desirable for maximum maintainability in designs.

Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough-- often that I'm generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write.Peter Norvig demonstrates that 16 out of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns are simplified or eliminated by language features in Lisp or Dylan.

[10] In an interview with InformIT in 2009, Erich Gamma stated that the book authors had a discussion in 2005 on how they would have refactored the book and concluded that they would have recategorized some patterns and added a few additional ones, such as extension object/interface, dependency injection, type object, and null object.