The Intended Audience

This book is a general introduction to fundamental OO concepts, with code examples to reinforce the concepts. One of the most difficult juggling acts was to keep the code conceptual while still providing a solid code base. The goal of this book is to enable a reader to understand the concepts and technology without having a compiler at hand. However, if you do have a compiler available, there is code to be executed and explored.

The intended audience includes business managers, designers, developers, programmers, project managers, and anyone who wants to gain a general understanding of what object orientation is all about. Reading this book should provide a strong foundation for moving to other books covering more advanced OO topics.

Of these more advanced books, one of my favorites is Object-Oriented Design in Java, by Stephen Gilbert and Bill McCarty. I really like the approach of the book and have used it as a textbook in classes I have taught on OO concepts. I cite Object-Oriented Design in Java often throughout this book, and I recommend that you graduate to it after you complete this one.

Other books that I have found very helpful include Effective C++, by Scott Meyers; Classical and Object-Oriented Software Engineering, by Stephen R. Schach; Thinking in C++, by Bruce Eckel; UML Distilled, by Martin Fowler; and Java Design, by Peter Coad and Mark Mayfield.

While teaching intro-level programming and web development classes to programmers at corporations and universities, it quickly became obvious to me that most of these programmers easily picked up the language syntax; however, these same programmers struggled with the OO nature of the language.