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Object-Oriented Software Construction

Book by Bertrand Meyer

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Object-Oriented Software Construction, also called OOSC, is a book by Bertrand Meyer, widely considered a foundational text of object-oriented programming. The first edition was published in 1988; the second edition, extensively revised and expanded (more than 1300 pages), in 1997. Many translations are available including Dutch (first edition only), French (1+2), German (1), Italian (1), Japanese (1+2), Persian (1), Polish (2), Romanian (1), Russian (2), Serbian (2), and Spanish (2). The book has been cited thousands of times. As of 15 December 2011, The Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Guide to Computing Literature counts 2,233 citations, for the second edition alone in computer science journals and technical books; Google Scholar lists 7,305 citations. As of September 2006, the book is number 35 in the list of all-time most cited works (books, articles, etc.) in computer science literature, with 1,260 citations. The book won a Jolt award in 1994. The second edition is available online free.

Unless otherwise indicated, descriptions below apply to the second edition.

01Focus

The book presents object technology as an answer to major issues of software engineering, with a special emphasis on addressing the software quality factors of correctness, robustness, extendibility and reusability. It starts with an examination of the issues of software quality, then introduces abstract data types as the theoretical basis for object technology and proceeds with the main object-oriented techniques: classes, objects, genericity, inheritance, Design by Contract, concurrency, and persistence. It includes extensive discussions of methodological issues.

02Table of contents

Preface etc.
Part A: The issues

1 Software quality
2 Criteria of object orientation

Part B: The road to object orientation

3 Modularity
4 Approaches to reusability
5 Towards object technology
6 Abstract data types

Part C: Object-oriented techniques

7 The static structure: classes
8 The run-time structure: objects
9 Memory management
10 Genericity
11 Design by Contract: building reliable software
12 When the contract is broken: exception handling
13 Supporting mechanisms
14 Introduction to inheritance
15 Multiple inheritance
16 Inheritance techniques
17 Typing
18 Global objects and constants

Part D: Object-oriented methodology:
applying the method well

19 On methodology
20 Design pattern: multi-panel interactive systems
21 Inheritance case study: “undo” in an interactive system
22 How to find the classes
23 Principles of class design
24 Using inheritance well
25 Useful techniques
26 A sense of style
27 Object-oriented analysis
28 The software construction process
29 Teaching the method

Part E: Advanced topics

30 Concurrency, distribution, client-server and the Internet
31 Object persistence and databases
32 Some O-O techniques for graphical interactive applications

Part F: Applying the method in various
languages and environments

33 O-O programming and Ada
34 Emulating object technology in non-O-O environments
35 Simula to Java and beyond: major O-O languages and environments

Part G: Doing it right

36 An object-oriented environment
Epilogue, In Full Frankness Exposing the Language

Part H: Appendices

A Extracts from the Base library
B Genericity versus inheritance
C Principles, rules, precepts and definitions
D A glossary of object technology
E Bibliography

Index

03Notation

The first edition of the book used the programming language Eiffel for the examples and served as a justification of the language design choices for Eiffel. The second edition also uses Eiffel as its notation, but in an effort to separate the notation from the concepts it does not name the language until the Epilogue, on page 1162, where Eiffel appears as the last word. A few months after publication of the second edition, a reader posted on Usenet his discovery that the book's 36 chapters alternatively start with the letters E, I, F, F, E, L, a pattern being repeated 6 times. Also, in the Appendix, titled "Epilogue, In Full Frankness Exposing the Language" (in first initials), the first letters of each paragraph spell the same pattern.

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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Object-Oriented Software Construction”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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Related topics

Uniform access principle

The uniform access principle of computer programming was put forth by Bertrand Meyer. It states "All services offered by a module should be available through a uniform notation, which does not betray whether they are implemented through storage or through computation." This principle applies generally to the syntax of object-oriented programming languages.