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

The Open-Closed Nature of Independent Objects

In his book Object-Oriented Software Construction, Bertrand Meyer introduced the Open-Closed Principle. This principle may be one of the most confusingly stated ideas in all of computing and has led to a whole sub-industry of articles and podcasts explaining how a ShapeRenderer can draw Squares and Circles (of course, I have also partaken of such, and will continue here).

The Open-Closed Principle says that a module (an object, in our case) should be open to extension – it should be possible to extend its behavior for new purposes – and yet closed to modification – you should not need to change it. This design principle comes with a cost, as you need to design your objects to support extensibility along lines that are not yet known (or at least, to make it clear which lines are or are not going to be fruitful) in return for the benefit that maintainers and users of the objects know that they are going to be stable and will...