Introduction

To gain an understanding of some new area, it is virtually unavoidable to be immersed in the material for a while without exactly understanding where it will lead.

Principles of Object-Oriented Software Development

themes and variations -- object speak
abstraction -- paradigms of programming
software development -- the OO life-cycle
object technology -- trends

Additional keywords and phrases: object, data abstraction, analysis, design, implementation, distribution

slide: Introduction

This first chapter will give a preliminary characterization of object-oriented software development, sketch some of its history and give an outline of the main themes of this book. The dominant theme may be summarized by the phrase that object-orientation provides the software developer with the right abstractions for the analysis, design, implementation, and perhaps even the testing of complex software systems. The underlying theme of the book, however, is to indicate the technological requirements that must be satisfied to employ these abstractions effectively in actual software development. Yet another theme of the book is based on the observation that what OO offers is not altogether new. So, we will relate the solutions offered by OO to their precedents in the history of computer programming and software design. The reader may then establish whether OO is just another toy for software developers or a significant contribution to both software engineering and programming.