Object-Oriented Programming with C++ and Smalltalk

Rating:
Summary: A long way from "Random Football"
Review: A short thirty years ago, one of the best bass players on the planet was slightly distracted by all nite work in the computer lab in Champaign-Urbana... I can see that what was Jazz's loss, is an engineering gain. It a long way from "Soft Machine", "Random Football", and basement study sessions, but it appears to have been worth it. Congratulations, Cal!

Rating:
Summary: great "object oriented" book
Review: I looked at some of the previous reviews, apparently these people have been looking for a C++ language book. If thats what you want, hit the back button now. This book is about object orientation, regardless of language barriers. It introduces concepts which you can carry across several languages. "Coders" won't find much in this book but "Engineers" would love it. The author does not insult your intelligence by spoonfeeding you (like those 21 days ...books). If you consider yourself a design oriented engineer, this is the book to have on your shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Buy this book.
Review: This is a pretty nice piece of work of a bass player, educated at MIT and former instructor at the EECS Dept. of the University of Illinois at Chicago! I was one of the lucky ones who took the Object Oriented Concepts and Programming class at UIC, when Caleb was teaching the class. This is your definite reference, delivered from someone who really *knows* the concepts covered in the book.

Rating:
Summary: This is a very good book.
Review: This is an excellent book. It illustrates the OO concepts and the language design using Smalltalk and C++ as examples. I have to say it is a very very good book. C++ and Smalltalk go opposite direction in term of implementing the language. I learn a lot from this book. I recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: A great book...sorry it had to end
Review: With no doubt, this is the best book on object-oriented programming out there. The author addresses not only the theoretical concepts behind OO-programming, but he outlines how to do it using Smalltalk, one of the first OO-languages, and C++, certainly one of the most widely-used OO-languages. I do not know Smalltalk, and did not read the part on this language, so my comments will be limited to the sections on C++ and the general discussions on OO-programming.

The author gives an overview of the semantics or "meaning" of a program. He is very thorough in his treatment, and some of the areas that I found particularly well-written include his discussions of:Order of evaluation and side effects; conditional, controlled, and implicit iteration; the importance of strong typing in giving more reliable code; the run-time stack; passing by name, by value, by value-result,and by reference; declarations versus definitions; the difference between static and dynamic typing; static versus dynamic scoping; object lifetime and instantiation; static, automatic, and dynamic storage; data types; pointers; constrained types; encapsulation and information hiding; abstraction mechanisms; programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, logic, and object-oriented; =class semantics; the distinction between "pure" OO-languages such as Smalltalk, Eiffel, and Java, and hybrid OO-languages such as Object Pascal, Oberon, Delphi Pascal, Ada95, C++, and Objective C; the tradeoffs between execution time and dynamic binding in C++; the justification for using in-line functions rather than macros in C++; static, file, local function, and class scope in C++; static and dynamic storage allocation of objects in C++; the distinction between a class in C++, which must be an instance, and thus not "first-class" as in Smalltalk; friend declarations in C++ and how they depart from OO-philosophy; the example of the "Queue" class; the "this" pointer in C++; "smart" pointers in C++; and class templates in C++.

He does not include a discussion of object-oriented design methodologies (Booch, etc), but does give references for further reading. Excellent summaries are given at the end of each chapter along with exercises.It is definitely a book that serves well also as a reference, even though it was published in 1997, and some changes to the implementation of C++ have occurred since then.