Book Image

Modern Programming: Object Oriented Programming and Best Practices

By : Graham Lee
Book Image

Modern Programming: Object Oriented Programming and Best Practices

By: Graham Lee

Overview of this book

Your experience and knowledge always influence the approach you take and the tools you use to write your programs. With a sound understanding of how to approach your goal and what software paradigms to use, you can create high-performing applications quickly and efficiently. In this two-part book, you’ll discover the untapped features of object-oriented programming and use it with other software tools to code fast and efficient applications. The first part of the book begins with a discussion on how OOP is used today and moves on to analyze the ideas and problems that OOP doesn’t address. It continues by deconstructing the complexity of OOP, showing you its fundamentally simple core. You’ll see that, by using the distinctive elements of OOP, you can learn to build your applications more easily. The next part of this book talks about acquiring the skills to become a better programmer. You’ll get an overview of how various tools, such as version control and build management, help make your life easier. This book also discusses the pros and cons of other programming paradigms, such as aspect-oriented programming and functional programming, and helps to select the correct approach for your projects. It ends by talking about the philosophy behind designing software and what it means to be a "good" developer. By the end of this two-part book, you will have learned that OOP is not always complex, and you will know how you can evolve into a better programmer by learning about ethics, teamwork, and documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part One – OOP The Easy Way
5
Part Two – APPropriate Behavior

Rediscovering Lost Knowledge

You might think that, with software being such a fast-moving field, everything we're doing now is based on everything we were doing last year, with induction proving that there's a continuous unbroken history linking current practice to the "ENIAC girls" and Colossus wrens of the 1940s. In fact, the truth is pretty much the exact opposite of that; practices seen as out of date are just as likely to be rejected and forgotten as to be synthesized into modern practice.

As an example, I present my own experience with programming. I was born into the microcomputer revolution, and the first generation of home computers. Programming taught on these machines was based on either the BASIC language of the 1960s or using assemblers. The advances made by structured programming, object-oriented programming, procedural programming, and functional programming were all either ignored or thought of as advanced topics inappropriate to microprogramming. It wasn...