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!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18715 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-27
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 634 pages

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.

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Customer Reviews

Great books too bad i didn't need it
Well i haven't actually looked at this book, but I own the first edition too. My teacher marked this as required so I bought it. The first version is not only how I learned O.O.P. but also how I learned java. It is a great starter book to get the idea of objects and inheritance/polymorphism. I flipped through a few pages and it looks very similar to the first version, so I'm sure whichever you get, they will be a great asset in your learning of java and object oriented programming in java.

Fantastic introduction or refresher on object oriented concepts
How I wish I'd had this book earlier in my programming career!

The Head First series use a novel teaching style that is designed to be engaging and informative and to work for a wide range of people. We all learn in different ways so this book uses them all to make sure you get the point.

The examples are clear and the concepts presented in a way that I was able to understand them and immediately began to see ways to effectively use them in my daily design, coding and testing tasks.

Even if you have been doing object oriented programming for a while you will still get a lot out of this book.

I can't recommend this book too highly.

Ray

Toe-curling code and gratuite repetitiveness
I'm a supporter of the Head First approach to learning, but this one has failed to hit the mark. I can live with a fair number of typos (which this book certainly has), however bad or broken code in just too many places is not so easily forgiveable. The authors hammer on principles of good OO design, but clearly did not test-drive the code that is supposed to show-case those design principles. To mention a few: missing return statement (p6), ClassCastException (p212), NullPointerException (p254), an Inventory search method that will fail to find anything if an instance of type InstrumentSpec (as opposed to a derived type) is passed to it (p211,212,238) (while authors suggested on the previous page to re-design InstrumentSpec to be non-abstract for this reason), non-standard UML for implementing an interface (p224). I could probably go on, but stopped reading (maybe I'll pick up later).
Another thing I find is that there is too much fluff and repetitiveness. Some may argue this is a trademark of the Head First series, and that it helps you conquer the learning curve. I will agree on the Head First classics (you know 'm), but here it starts to get boring quickly, and you find yourself flipping instead of reading after a while...
To conclude, you'll learn a thing or two if you're relatively new to OOA&D. And although the book definitely has some good points, like the explanations of object-oriented design principles (the foundations of patterns), there are better (spell-checked and peer edited) and denser books out there.