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

Test-Driven Development

TDD (Test-Driven Development) is such a big topic, plenty of books have been written about it. Indeed, one of those books was written by me: Test-Driven iOS Development (http://www.pearsoned.co.uk/bookshop/detail.asp?item=100000000444373). So, I won't go into too much detail here. If you've never come across test-driven development before, or the phrase "red-green-refactor," I recommend Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests (http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/) (unless you're focusing on iOS, of course).

The point of TDD

People talk about test-driven development as a way to ensure high test coverage. It does that, for sure. But its main utility is as a design tool. You can construct an executable specification of a module or class, based on how you need to use that class in your product. Often, I'll create some tests while I'm designing a class, but remove them as the code changes and they become obsolete.

I...