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!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40237 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-27
• 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.

Customer Reviews

fun take on object orientation basics
HFOOA&D is designed to introduce the reader to the process of designing software. It doesn't push a formal methodology, but covers the basic building blocks that are common to most approaches, including requirements gathering, use cases and iterative design. Additionally, there is heavy emphasis on design principles such as the Open-Closed Principle, and the Single Responsibility Principle and more general concepts such as encapsulation and cohesion. UML class diagrams are used, but no more than the basics. Design patterns are mentioned in places, but you don't need any knowledge of them to understand what's going on. This book is more about the principles that underlie design patterns. Indeed, for those wondering where this book fits in with Head First Java and Head First Design Patterns, you should read HFJ first, then this one, and then HFDP.

Java is used as the language throughout - while Java 5.0 features are avoided (apart from enums), you still need to know the syntax and be comfortable with the mechanisms by which Java implements objects, such as interfaces. You can't jump into this book with just knowledge of VB, for example.

The material is treated in the usual Head First style: off-the-wall scenarios, conversational writing, lots of dialogue delivered in a pseudo-comic book style by using photos of real people, anthropomorphism of computer terms. A lot of effort is put into making the experience seem as much like social interaction as possible. It's a winning formula, and it works again here.

But Head First Java and Head First Design Patterns were two really stellar books. So, by comparison with those two, I must admit to being a little disappointed with this one. Maybe it's because this book was rewritten from scratch over a short time period, after an initial treatment by Dave Wood (google hfoobook to find the old webpage), but while there are some nice touches here and there, overall, this lacks the pizzazz of HFJ and HFDP. There are noticeably fewer pop culture references and the use of characters and scenarios are less memorable. Also, there are a couple of rhetorical devices lifted from HFDP. These are less fresh the second time around.

And in parts, the explanations are a little fuzzy. Partly this is due to the inherent fuzziness of design, partly due to the approach this book takes of showing the different aspects of analysis and design in an iterative fashion, with a series of long examples, which work very well in other ways. But Head First Design Patterns demonstrated that you can tackle this sort of material with clarity. Here, I suspect many will be left feeling confused about the difference between association, aggregation and composition in UML - some Java examples would have been illuminating.

However, HFDP was always going to be a very tough act to follow. If HFOOA&D isn't quite as good as that, it's still far preferable to slogging through the sort of heavyweight process books it competes with.

Well thought out book
I have become quite a fan of Head First books as they are very easy to read in short periods of time, whilst still giving you useful information. The book does use Java for all its example code, but I am sure the principles would apply to other OO languages. Most of the book has little code in it as it does say its best to delay coding as long as possible so you can iron out design issues ahead of time.

I studied an MSc that was supposed to cover OO design and UML - I wish I had seen this book at the time as it was much clearer and more practical than my uni notes or the suggested textbooks.

Building good software
When building systems, too often I'm wondering to myself - are there better ways to do this? Is this really the way everybody else approaches software projects? This book clears up and answers those issues.

The book covers the S/W development process well - good real world examples. If you've been building applications for a while now - but need to tidy up or learn completely new ways for your approach to building systems this is the book for you.

You don't need to be an experienced developer, there is no complicated code, just nice simple examples in Java.