Absolutely learn the patterns. You will encounter places to use them. The book isn't an instruction book on how to write software. It is a "here are some useful patterns the occur occasionally during development". Having a common language to talk about such things is useful.

It is very easy to over-apply patterns at the cost of readability and maintainability. Realize the your code is more likely to be rewritten before the of the features provided by your applications of patterns are used.