design patterns

I feel like I should pick up a book on common design patterns or maybe any kind of text with explanations of the thought process that real programmers take when dealing with medium size projects. The intense pondering I've been doing about this file reader is useful but I wonder if I'm missing something obvious that's a better way of doing it. Matt revealed the model-view-controller paradigm to me recently and that more or less blew my mind. Makes me wonder what else is out there.