I found the first chapter of Design Patterns to be the most enlightening description of OO programming I have found.
Ask HN: What are some good books for understanding OOP?
21–26 of 26 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some good books for understanding OOP?
#22The 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…
In situations like those, I feel like OOP is some of the most buzzword laden areas of CS. Things like "Cohesion", "Layering", "Polymorphism", "Abstraction", etc. They are all great concepts with a lot of important principles, but I drives me nuts how often I've heard them used excessively.
I would put http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle at the top of the list of things to understand. Language features like polymorphism and encapsulation aren't exclusively OO but they're provided because they help your designs follow LSP.
Re: Ask HN: What are some good books for understanding OOP?
#23Object Oriented Programming by Timothy Budd. Its the starting book that I got and is proving very helpful to me.
Re: Ask HN: What are some good books for understanding OOP?
#24Thank you all for the suggestions. Its given me a lot of food for thought.
Re: Ask HN: What are some good books for understanding OOP?
#25I have an intense desire to contribute to the Chromium Project, however, I too am a programming novice. I know a bit of Java, but not much else. I understand that this is a monumental end goal given my current situation, but can anyone point me in the direction of the best tutorial books that money can buy? Good karma for anyone that responds :)
you may want to check this out: http://www.aaronboodman.com/2010/10/wherein-i-help-you-get-g...
It seems that your first step is to to find good C++ resources: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/155762/best-c-resource
Hope this helps.
Re: Ask HN: What are some good books for understanding OOP?
#26I highly recommend Head First Java, which focuses on OOP using Java. The entire Head First series is very well written, and focuses on practical learning rather than reference or academia as a lot of the suggestions do.