If you haven't read the Go4 patterns book, you don't deserve to call yourself a real software engineer
I read it, hated it, and would never recommend it for a few reasons, but mostly because I already knew Common Lisp when I read it (though I was writing Java full-time in my day job at the time) and so each time I read a new pattern I would think about how it was usually just an ugly hack to work around the poor design of a language like Java.
You might argue that a "real software engineer" will have to use crappy languages at some point and so should know the hacks to compensate. I'd argue that knowledge of a bunch of different languages makes those hacks obvious anyway - so I'd tell people to just spend time learning lots of languages instead of reading the patterns book.
I read it, hated it, and would never recommend it for a few reasons, but mostly because I already knew Common Lisp when I read it (though I was writing Java full-time in my day job at the time) and so each time I read a new pattern I would think about how it was usually just an ugly hack to work around the poor design of a language like Java.
You might argue that a "real software engineer" will have to use crappy languages at some point and so should know the hacks to compensate. I'd argue that knowledge of a bunch of different languages makes those hacks obvious anyway - so I'd tell people to just spend time learning lots of languages instead of reading the patterns book.