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Object Primer Text

 
Greenhorn
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I do training and have found that "traditional" "legacy" programmers often have difficulty changing their mindset to objects. Have you found that this text is useful for retraining these types of folks?
 
Ranch Hand
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Haven't read the book, but looking at the contents, I am not sure. Of course, the author can correct me if I am wrong!

I recently did a study of a bunch of books as I had to do something similar. I looked at a lot of 'Object Thinking' books, but did not find anything satisfactory.

Finally, I looked up an old book that was in my shelf for a long time - "Software Engineering by Stephen Schach". There is a chapter there about cohesion and coupling and how it matters for procedural (aka Legacy) and OO languages. I took notes and mentioned that to my collegues to who I gave the lecture, and to my surprise, they were able to quite clearly understand the problems with the procedural way of programming. You might want to strongly consider this approach.
 
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Depends on your approach to teaching, I suppose, and what you're trying to achieve.

If you're looking for a really solid overview of agility, agile modeling, a wide range of modeling techniques, and how to go all the way to code then you might want to consider the book. If you're only looking for the basics of OO then The Object Primer is likely overkill for you. Yes, as I indicate in another posting the title isn't all that accurate any more, but fortunately the first two editions sold very well so the publisher was leery of changing the title. That was a decision which I didn't agree with.

There are several universities using The Object Primer as a text book. It includes a running case study as an example throughout the book and has a second case study for students to work on as well. Each chapter has questions, some pertaining to the case study, many not, so if you're looking for problem sets then this is likely the book for you. The case study questions are basically along the lines of "using technique X, model aspect Y". The non-case study questions will usually be philosophical in nature, for example I'll ask the student to compare and contrast two techniques, OR will ask the student to research an issue on the net to find the latest material on a subject. I'm a firm believer that the schools should be teaching people to research topics on their own.

- Scott
 
Sathya Srinivasan
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Thanks for the clarification Scott. Out of curiosity, if you had the chance to name the book as something else, what would it have been?
 
Scott Ambler
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The Agile Primer comes to mind, or perhaps Agile Model Driven Development.

- Scott
 
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