OO design - Good place to start?

Pixel posted on Sunday, July 15, 2007

Hi,

I'm quite new to enterprise development and would like to go bakc to basics and read up on the whole OO design techniques.   I've come to CSLA after moving from being an ASP scripter towards VB.NET.  I'm still web focussed but I really want more detail and how and why to design an application in the OO way.   I'm not totally new to it I did do a 3 month module at University in the 2nd year on 'Smalltalk' and I pulled in 100% for the module, the only one in a class of 120, but that was like 12 years ago.

Even if I can just review a few more sample applications as well as the project tracker I'd be happy.  Are there any really good OO books from the early stages of how and why that I should know about?  As an ASP guy my thinking is very DB focussed i.e. relational and procedural but it's getting difficult to be taken seriously anymore.

Any really basic books on UML, CRC and other OO design techniques as well?  Most of my original knowledge has been supersceded or merged into different techniques.  I want to start documenting my apps properly and see this whole (re)learning curve as a way to kill two birds with one stone.

Thanks.

Pixel.

JonM replied on Sunday, July 15, 2007

Just reading Rocky's books will help a lot.  He walks through the creation of the Project Tracker demo and all of the objects.  As for the why it depends on what your goals are.  If you are building a medium to large bussiness app, OO lets you break the problem down into pieces that you can wrap your head around.  Usually the objects will represent entities specific to the problem domain. (eg. Customers, Invoices, Invoice Line Items, and so on).   OO also helps in the code re-use story.  Write a piece of functionality once, place it in a class and simply create an instance oo the class any time you need that functionality.

georgeb replied on Monday, July 16, 2007

I found "Applying UML and Patterns" by Graig Larman a very nice introduction to OOA and to Unified Process. The book really helps to understand basic concepts of OO. Rocky's book is extremely usefull and also for the formal notation and many resources on UML vist the OMG site www.omg.org .

josh.kodroff replied on Monday, July 16, 2007

Another good book for theory is Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler.  It covers both the database-centric motif that you're probably already familiar with and the OO motif that CSLA uses.

Pixel replied on Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Thanks.  I think Rocky mentioned Martin Fowler when I was in Orlando at VS Live.

My main goals is to use the UML and documentation techniques as well as building a sound, extensible application.  Our company has been founded for one purpose....to be sold.  If we have the documentation for the main application it will really help.

If anyone has any other books I'd appreciate it.

Thanks.

Pixel.