Ask HN: How to Learn OOP

This is actually a really good summary. I also agree on learning Smalltalk to learn OOP since it has a really easy syntax, you can deep dive into implementation details if you want to easily and it enforces some best practices like setter and getter instead of giving you the ability to just declare members public. I learned Java in University and switched soon to Objective-C and it took me a while to see reasons behind getters and setters especially since I worked only in small teams on short living projects at that time. Also s Smalltalk is purely OOP so you won't get distracted by numbers and bools behaving differently. And finally it gets you to think in data structures thanks to the collection methods.

The hope behind learning paradigms, like OO or functional, is that you can transfer what you learned in one language to another. So if you're just looking to level up your OO, your best bet is to pick up the most interesting OO book you can find and just follow along. I like Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz.

It's going to be difficult to find excellent OO resources for every conceivable language and stack.

I remember stumbling across this book in my university library back in 2000, that really helped me understand the principles when all the other books were talking far more about syntax and functionality without really explaining the "why" part.

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Object-Oriented-Programm...

I didn't learn OOP very well in school, but once I wrote enough code I started to see that it was becoming a massive cluster fuck and I couldn't remember what I wrote half the time. So I broke it down into functions, but then I was passing huge amounts of arguments into some of the functions. Then I realized I had a lot of functions where the 90% of same thing was happening so I passed a keyword into the function to make it do something slightly differently in an if else. Then I realized I could create a class, store the variables in the class and call the class methods without passing the arguments, which was much cleaner. Then I realized that I could create a class that inherits and overrides the 10% difference of the other class, which was again much cleaner. Those are the basic two problems that OOP solved for me and I've taken it many steps further a couple of times, but it can definitely be abused. If you get to that point, you should start looking at design patterns to learn how OOP is used correctly. Lynda.com has some good videos on OOP design patterns you can use their free trial for. They're by the author of one of the highest rated books on design patterns and pretty short.

This was the book that really drilled into my head how to design in OO. It's VEEEEERRRRYYY easy to understand and will give the good heuristics to use in OO design. https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00AA36RZY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_...