Object-oriented Programming

by Richard Pawson - Foreword by Alan Kay

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a radical way of writing software, where the fundamental building blocks have both ‘state’ (data) and ‘behaviour’ (functionality). As Alan Kay – ACM Turing Award recipient and one of the pioneers of OOP – writes in the Foreword, this is like building a program out of thousands of tiny self-contained computers intercommunicating via their own internal network, an idea that was partly inspired by his understanding of molecular biology.

This is the first OOP textbook that has been written specifically for the context of A-level Computer Science. It will give you a solid grounding both in the theory of OOP, and in the practical application of the theory to real-world problems.

Part I teaches the fundamental principles of OOP – encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance, association, and more – through the development of an interactive drawing program from scratch. Each principle is introduced as the response to a real design challenge.

Part II introduces some of the techniques appropriate for building much larger scale applications – including the ‘persistence’ of objects in a database – in the context of building a simple ‘records management’ system for school administration.