Do I need to be a design patterns expert before I dive into Domain Driven Design? [closed]

Question

I have a copy of Head First Design Patterns and I read through a few of the patterns in there. Now is Domain driven design a substitute to the traditional design patterns or does it build upon it? If its the latter, do I need to be a Design patterns expert before I attempt to learn domain driven design? What is the recommended path to DDD?

Answer 1

I read the blue book [Evans], the red book [Vernon] and occasionally pop into this tag on StackOverflow.

The book by Evans is very high level in some aspects and covers more than just code. The book by Vernon covers the building blocks of DDD an item at a time, using examples from a fictitious software product as an example:

Domain-driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

Implementing Domain-Driven Design

There's also the video:

Eric Evans: What I've learned about DDD since the book

As for design patterns, the DDD material refers to lots of design patterns. Some existing design patterns work very well with DDD. You can pick these up as you encounter them, you wont necessarily need to know them in advance. One thing to avoid when learning design patterns, is to not try and force their use, they have their uses but you see a lot of developers trying to force the use of newly learnt design patterns in places where they aren't required.