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by Adam Green.
Original Post: Book Note: The Object-Oriented Thought Process
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The last time I did real OOP was in 1992, when Borland hired me to write a user manual for a new version of the dBASE language, which was meant to be completely object oriented. It was being built by a crazy German programmer, with whom Philippe Kahn was so enamored that he allowed him to be the lead designer, coder, and project manager. You can guess how that arrangement worked out. It was a great gig for me, however, since Borland paid me to stop teaching for a year and do nothing but think about using OOP techniques. I ended up building some amazing UI widgets, but never really got to create any large scale applications, since the code was too incomplete. I did learn a lot about teaching OOP to procedural programmers by travelling around the country and demoing my examples at dBASE user groups. I've now collected a lot of books on OOP to prepare me for designing class libraries in Ruby. This book is a good introduction to the concepts of OOP and Unified Modeling Language (UML), but it has the classic failing of using silly examples. While setting up a class library of mammals, with cats and dogs as subclasses may seem like a good conceptual model, it makes no sense for teaching programmers why they should use OOP. Programmers, like all engineers, are too task oriented. If you can't show them how something will help them write better code faster, they really aren't interested. If you've never read anything on OOP this is a good place to start, otherwise, you aren't likely to gain much from it.
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