[adrusi]

In my experience it's impossible to know what "pattern" to use where in real life code into you've made and realized the mistake that the pattern solves.

sitting down and learning a bunch of patterns and then using them without a deep understanding of why they are useful is misguided, and you'll end up with dogmatic code. not that it won't help, it's just not the most important step. the most important step is to write at least medium sized code bases without putting your ego into them so that you can be savvy to your mistakes.