[Tutor] OOP book recommendation

[alan.gauld@bt.com]

> I'm really interested in getting a handle on OOP. I know 
> Alan Gauld recommends:
> "Object Oriented Analysis" by Coad and Yourdon
> "Object Oriented Programming" by Budd

These would be my "first book" recommendations.

Booch and Meyer are better if you want an "in depth" treatment.

But OO is really a new way of thinking for procedural 
programmers and it takes a while to get used to it. 

Its been said that your first OO project will be a
bad OO design, the second will be no worse than if you 
had used non OO techniques and by the time you do the 
third one you're starting to get the benefits. I'd go 
along with that, so make the first and second projects 
short and non critical!

The whole conversion to OO process usually takes between 
3-6 months for a traditional programmer. Its much better 
to learn OO from the start! Also for some reason hardware 
and real/time engineers seem to grasp OO quicker 
- OO message passing has a lot of similarities 
to event driven/interrupt driven architectures I suspect.

> Anyone have one to add?

I also like Jesse Liberty's 'From Clouds to Code' book 
- but you need the basic OO background from C/Y or Budd 
to understand it.

Similarly Fowler's UML Distilled is a good quick intro to both 
UML and the OO design process - but assumes you've got the 
basics already.

Brad Cox's OOP book is also a good explanation too but being based 
on Objective C and using his own SoftIC notation its not too 
portable to other things.

Alan G.