What is your prefered way to communicate between components?

GetComponent? messages? a centralized game manager?

 

I like GetComponent<T>() then holding onto the reference if possible.

 

This really depends on your architecture. One of good ways is using events since it allows invoking events and subscribing to events from multiple locations anonymously.

 

Most of the time I use a centralized class attached to an empty GameObject. Sometimes I do what @Garth Smith does and use a reference set by GetComponent in Start().
Once in a blue moon, or dealing with GUIs I use SendMessage().
I very rarely use events, I don't like them because the code is messy.

...speaking of clean code, I've heard of assets on the Unity store that will handle communication between objects with very minimalistic code. I may look into this for my next project.

 

Whatever works for the situation. GetComponent, singleton, static references, inspector references, dynamic loading, manager classes, GameObject.Find, ExecuteEvents... And so on.

I really don't have a favourite. I just use whatever structure is relevant to the game I'm building.

 

I've never used messages, but if I want to decouple the code even more, I would use them. It feels and might be the "correct thing to do", but i find it ugly, messy, and difficult to debug.

Of course it depends of context.