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Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (Head First)
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by Brett D. McLaughlin, Gary Pollice, and Dave West
Sales Rank: 4819
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List Price: $49.99
$31.49
At Amazon
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Paperback: 634 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. November 27, 2006
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596008678
ISBN-13: 978-0596008673
Product Dimensions:
9.2 x 8 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds
Product Description
"Head First Object Oriented Analysis and Design is a refreshing look at subject of OOAD. What sets this book apart is its focus on learning. The authors have made the content of OOAD accessible, usable for the practitioner."
Ivar Jacobson, Ivar Jacobson Consulting
"I just finished reading HF OOA&D and I loved it! The thing I liked most about this book was its focus on why we do OOA&D-to write great software!"
Kyle Brown, Distinguished Engineer, IBM
"Hidden behind the funny pictures and crazy fonts is a serious, intelligent, extremely well-crafted presentation of OO Analysis and Design. As I read the book, I felt like I was looking over the shoulder of an expert designer who was explaining to me what issues were important at each step, and why."
Edward Sciore, Associate Professor, Computer Science Department, Boston College
Tired of reading Object Oriented Analysis and Design books that only makes sense after you're an expert? You've heard OOA&D can help you write great software every time-software that makes your boss happy, your customers satisfied and gives you more time to do what makes you happy.
But how?
Head First Object-Oriented Analysis & Design shows you how to analyze, design, and write serious object-oriented software: software that's easy to reuse, maintain, and extend; software that doesn't hurt your head; software that lets you add new features without breaking the old ones. Inside you will learn how to: - Use OO principles like encapsulation and delegation to build applications that are flexible
- Apply the Open-Closed Principle (OCP) and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) to promote reuse of your code
- Leverage the power of design patterns to solve your problems more efficiently
- Use UML, use cases, and diagrams to ensure that all stakeholders are communicating clearly to help you deliver the right software that meets everyone's needs.
By exploiting how your brain works, Head First Object-Oriented Analysis & Design compresses the time it takes to learn and retain complex information. Expect to have fun, expect to learn, expect to be writing great software consistently by the time you're finished reading this!
About The Author
Brett McLaughlin is a guitar player who is still struggling with the realization that you can't pay the bills if you're into acoustic fingerstyle blues and jazz. He's just recently discovered, to his delight, that writing books that help people become better programmers does pay the bills. He's very happy about this, as are his wife Leigh, and his kids, Dean and Robbie. Before Brett wandered into Head First land, he developed enterprise Java applications for Nextel Communications and Allegiance Telecom. When that became fairly mundane, Brett took on application servers, working on the internals of the Lutris Enhydra servlet engine and EJB container. Along the way, Brett got hooked on open source software, and helped found several cool programming tools, like Jakarta turbine and JDOM.
Gary Pollice is a self-labeled curmudgeon (that's a crusty, ill- tempered, usually old man) who spent over 35 years in industry trying to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up. Even though he hasn't grown up yet, he did make the move in 2003 to the hallowed halls of academia where he has been corrupting the minds of the next generation of software developers with radical ideas like, "develop software for your customer, learn how to work as part of a team, design and code quality and elegance and correctness counts, and it's okay to be a nerd as long as you are a great one." Gary is a Professor of Practice (meaning he had a real job before becoming a professor) at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He went to WPI because he was so impressed with the WPI graduates that he's worked with over the years. He lives in central Massachusetts with his wife, Vikki, and their two dogs, Aloysius and Ignatius. When not working on geeky things he well he's always working on geeky things. You can see what he's up to by visiting his WPI home page at http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~gpollice/. Feel free to drop him a note and complain or cheer about the book.
Dave West would like to describe himself as sheik geek. Unfortunately no one else would describe him in that way. They would say he is a professional Englishman who likes to talk about software development best practices with the passion and energy of an evangelical preacher. Recently Dave has moved to Ivar Jacobson Consulting, where he runs the Americas and can combine his desire to talk about software development and spread the word on rugby and football, and argue that cricket is more exciting that baseball. Before running the Americas for Ivar Jacobson Consulting, Dave worked for a number of years at Rational Software (now a part of IBM). Dave held many positions at Rational and then IBM, including Product Manager for RUP where he introduced the idea of process plug-ins and agility to RUP. Dave still laments the days when he use to sit in a cube and write software in the city of London. This is where he believes he cut his teeth writing big insurance systems with nothing but a green screen and a process flow chart. Dave can be contacted at dwest@ivarjacobson.com, and if he is not with customers or drinking warm beer with his friends in Boston, he will email you back.
Customer Reviews & Comments
I like the Head First series, and even Head Rush, for its innovative and fun approach for introductory software topics. I've had small concerns on all of them but I have never been as ambivalent as I have for this book. I know a big part of this problem was that it was rewritten expeditious (I am still not sure of the reason why) and it shows throughout the book with spelling, logic and code errors. You can tell that the first chapter was rushed. There are several spelling and programming mistakes. The most egregious is where they ask you to look through some code to find what "FIRST" you change and then they answer that question with a much smaller problem (the main problem was they forgot to add a return statement (pg.5) and they write about the inconsistency of using String based searching). It has also been mentioned by several reviewers of the use of the method name "matches" which only makes sense for regex not for an equals operation. I also did not like the search example (how can you not think of price in a search?). The best part of this chapter is the mantra that should be practiced by many engineers: "Make sure your software does what the customer wants it to do." The next few chapters are definitely better (though still some spelling mistakes). They are a good read for beginners and intermediate programmers on gathering requirements, change of these requirements and analysis. The ideas are a bit simplistic though it is good to get many programmers used to the idea of UML and use cases and using them to drive requirement gathering and textual analysis. Intermediate and advanced readers familiar with use cases will gain more from reading Alistair Cockburn's "Writing Effective Use Cases" (or will already have read it) and for further UML reading should go with "UML Distilled" by Martin Fowler. When the book gets back to design I see some problems with the coding. The designer has this bizarre idea of abstracting all properties (under the guise of "encapsulate what varies") into a Map attribute to lessen the amount of subclasses for instruments. While initially this may seem a good idea it gets rid of all type-safe coding (you can now safely assign an instrument type to a backwood for the instrument), you cannot have behavior from the instruments (this is mentioned in the book) and if you put a property with one letter misspelled or capitalized out-of-place you now have a bug, one that you might have trouble finding thereby increasing maintenance costs. Too much flexibility makes the code ambiguous. After design, the studies get to solving really big problems, architecture, design principles, and iterating and testing. These chapters I enjoyed much more especially the chapter on design principles with the beginning mantra that "Originality is Overrated." This chapter goes over basic principles such as OCP (open-closed principle), DRY (don't repeat yourself), SRP (single responsibility principle) and LSP (Liskov Substitution Principle). Then the book last chapter (the ooa&d lifecycle) sums the lessons in the book in one large (somewhat contrived but these type of examples always are) program for the Objectville Subway. Then two terse appendixes dealing with ten additional OOA&D topics and OO concepts should make the reader realize that this book is just an introductory sliver of what needs to be learned for a sagacious software acumen. This book is useful for programmers with a bit of Java (or C#) knowledge who want to get a good overview of OOA&D. This book is useful because it teaches important OO vernacular and a simple holistic approach to iterative development. If the book did not have a "quickly done" feeling, better design and fewer mistakes I would have liked this book more. This book is a good candidate for a second edition. If you want a more thorough explanation of these topics I recommend "The Object Primer" by Scott Ambler as one of my favorite books for a good introduction to OOA&D.
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Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (Head First)
List Price: $49.99
Available from Amazon
Price: $31.49
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