Hi Rosa!

Let me start by complimenting you on the good question! Not only that, your question contains a perfect answer by itself!

Creating subclasses that include some sort of customization is indeed one of the ways to solve this problem. Other commonly used options are:

1. Provide a way to pass a generic configuration object into the creation method. Very easy in dynamically typed languages, but also doable in static languages.

2. Creation method can fetch configuration from some centralized place.

3. Remember that it's all just code; you can change all of this to suit your needs, there's no "pattern dogma". If none of the above fits nicely into your code, you can simply evolve your Factory Method into something else, such as the Builder or Dependency Injection patterns: you pass an already built product into the creation method. In this case, the Creator's mission may be to cast the passed object into the desired type (because you can't narrow down the parameter type in a subclass, but you can narrow down the resulting type, according to LSP).

Hi!

Thanks for asking! I used OmniGraffle (sadly, only available on macOS) with heavily customized UML stencils for most diagrams. The illustrations (comic strips, etc.) were initially drawn by hand and then vectorized in Inkscape.

Best of luck!

Hi!

There's no time limit, you can lear at your own pace.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Hi!

No, at least not yet. But maybe in the future 😉

Дякую вам за відгук!

Hi John!

Frankly, it's pretty hard to suggest anything at this level. I suggest you try to implement this all without any pattern in mind, and then if you discover some pain points, research what pattern can solve them (if you need any at all).

By the way, thank you for supporting the Ukrainian people!

Hi!

Imagine a youtube video player.

The relation between the play button and the player itself is a composition — the play button doesn't make sense outside of the player.

Now, imagine a playlist with a bunch of players. The relation between each player and the playlist itself is an aggregation — a player can both exists independently or as part of a playlist.

Hi!

Yes, the book has been recently translated into Korean as well.

Yes, that's correct, stars mean popularity by the most accurate metric I have — my experience (lol). However, until today, there were some glitches in the Korean version, and the stars didn't appear there correctly, maybe that was a source of confusion.

Thanks a lot for your feedback! I'm glad that you liked my work!