Sun, 29 Aug 2004

Objects for "Newbies"

Simple coding tips for junior to intermediate programmers new to objects.

• It's not a big deal to create a new class or method -- especially not a new method.
• Control structures don't appear as often in good OO code as in good procedural good.
• A method can be thought of as a function that retains state across invocations and can be called over and over again without having to re-initialize and pass in every parameter.
• Whenever a chunk of code becomes a good candidate for moving into a function in procedural terms, consider creating a class instead. This is especially true if it appears that the function would take many parameters and be called from many places.
• Whenever it appears that code might benefit from adding a comment, add a new method instead, and move the code that the comment would have applied to into the new method. Name the method something that summarizes the intent of the comment.
• If code is calling a method on another class and then calling a method on the returned value, consider creating a method on the other class that does the work.

Consider this exercise -- take a substantial piece of good procedural code and turn every function into a class. Not necessarily with the goal to produce an ideal implementation, but to explore the nature of objects.

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