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This tutorial is a collection of lectures to be held in the on-line
course Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming
Using C++
. In
this course, object-orientation is introduced as a new programming
concept which should help you in developing high quality software.
Object-orientation is
also introduced as a concept which makes developing of projects
easier. However, this is not a course for learning the C++
programming language. If you are interested in learning the language
itself, you might want to go through other tutorials, such as
C++: Annotations
by Frank Brokken and Karel Kubat.
In this
tutorial only those language concepts that are needed to present coding
examples are introduced.
And what makes object-orientation such a hot topic? To be honest, not
everything that is sold under the term of object-orientation is really
new. For example, there are programs written in procedural languages
like Pascal or C which use object-oriented concepts. But there exist a
few important features which these languages won't handle or won't
handle very well, respectively.
Some people will say that object-orientation is ``modern''. When reading
announcements of new products everything seems to be
``object-oriented''. ``Objects'' are everywhere. In
this tutorial we will try to outline characteristics of
object-orientation to allow you to judge those object-oriented products.
The tutorial is organized as follows. Chapter 2 presents a
brief overview of procedural programming to refresh your knowledge in
that area. Abstract data types are introduced in chapter 3
as a fundamental concept of object-orientation. After that we can start
to define general terms and beginning to view the world as consisting of
objects (chapter 4). Subsequent chapters present fundamental
object-oriented concepts (chapters 5 and 6).
Chapters 7 through 9 introduce C++ as an example
of an object-oriented programming language which is in wide-spread use.
Finally chapter 10 demonstrates how to apply
object-oriented programming to a real example.
Next: 2 A Survey of
Up: Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming
Previous: Preface
P. Mueller
8/31/1997