Design Patterns – In-Depth Definition of ‘Property Container’ Design Pattern

The decorator pattern is one that favours composition over inheritance [another OOP paradigm that is useful to learn about]

The main benefit of the decorator pattern - over subclassing is to allow more mix & match options. If you have, for instance, 10 different behaviours that a window can have, then this means - with subclassing - you need to create every different combination, which will also inevitably include a lot of code reuse.
However, what happens when you decide to add in a new behaviour?

With the decorator, you just add a new class which describes this behaviour, and that's it - the pattern allows you to effectively drop this in without any modification to the rest of the code.
With sub-classing, you've got a nightmare on your hands.
One question you asked was "how does subclassing change the parent class?" It's not that it changes the parent class; when it says an instance, it means any object you've 'instantiated' [if you're using Java or C#, for instance, by using the new command]. What it's referring to is, when you add these changes to a class, you've got no choice for that change to be there, even if you don't actually need it.

Alternatively, you can put all his functionality into a single class with it turned on/off via flags... but this ends up with a single class that becomes larger and larger as your project grows.
It's not unusual to start your project this way, and refactor into a decorator pattern once you hit an effective critical mass.

An interesting point that should be made: you can add the same functionality multiple times; so you could, for instance, have a window with double, triple or whatever amount or borders as you require.

The major point of the pattern is to enable run-time changes: you may not know how you want the window to look until the program is running, and this allows you to easily modify it. Granted, this can be done via the subclassing, but not as nicely.
And finally, it allows for functionality to be added to classes that you may not be able to edit - for example in sealed/final classes, or ones provided from other APIs

Although this is the first time I hear of the Mapper pattern, to me it sounds more like the Builder pattern rather than the Factory.

In the Factory pattern you encapsulate the logic for creating objects of a number of related classes. The prime example would be a situation where you need to create an object of a particular subclass of some abstract base class depending on some parameters. So a Factory always returns a pointer or a reference to the base class, but it actually creates an object of the appropriate derived class based on the parameters you give it.

In contrast, a Builder class always creates objects of the same class. You would use it if the creation of an object is complicated, e. g. its constructor takes lots of arguments, not all of which may be available instantly. So a builder object might be a place which stores the values for the constructor arguments until you have them all and are ready to create the "product", or it may provide reasonable default values and let you only specify the arguments whose values you need to change. A typical use case for the Builder pattern is for creating objects you might need in a unit test, to avoid cluttering the test code with all the creation logic.

To me a Mapper sounds like a variant of a Builder, where the constructor parameters come in the form of a database record or some other "raw" data structure.