Ask HN: What are some good books for understanding OOP?

Hi,

I am a novice programmer, currently self-learning, would really like to understand Object Oriented Programming well. Can anyone suggest some books that are good at explaning OOP for beginners?

Thanks for the help in advance.

In my opinion, Eric Evans' Domain Driven Design is just about the only book that gets OO right. Martin Fowler's Refactoring is pretty good on the technical side of things. I would avoid design patterns like the plague (edit: other than the Kent Beck Smalltalk book, which lots of smart people like - this is the one recommended by duck in this thread), but others disagree.

Don't take this as advice against learning what you want to learn, but I'd caution against the idea that "object-oriented programming" and "good programming" are the same thing (or even that they are correlated). OO in its various incarnations comes with a tremendous amount of baggage. It took me years to figure out I didn't need it, and that insight made me a much better programmer.

Check out "Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns": http://www.amazon.com/dp/013476904X/

Lots of OO classes use it and Smalltalk is a great language to learn OO with (but even if you don't use it, the general information will be a big help).

The Head First books are a great idea, but to me they force too much of their way to learning instead of just presenting the information. I'm sure that is helpful to some... but it just gives me a headache when I try to read through them.

The most important thing to realize is that "object-oriented programming" isn't a well defined term. If you don't know what it means and you pick up books about Smalltalk or CLOS, you won't really have a good grasp on the corporate C++/Java/C# environments you might be thrown into, and if you get a job interview that asks "explain OOP to me", they won't have any fucking idea what you're talking about, because by "OOP" they mean Java and by "OOP" you'll mean Smalltalk or CLOS. Likewise, if you pick up a Java book, it'll take you awhile to figure out what Smalltalkers, Lispers, and Rubyists are on about.

Unfortunately, the C++/Java conception of OOP has had a much better sales team since the 90's or so, so you can get sucked into that universe and never find your way out again. So learn OOP from multiple perspectives.