"William M. Klein" <wmklein@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:a5VLj.174423$uN4.76665@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Joe,
> although it is medium old, I would suggest looking at/for:
>
> "Object Orientation for Cobol Programming"
>
> by Ray Obin. See:
> http://www.bookfinder4u.com/IsbnSearch.aspx?isbn=1569280053&mode=direct
>
> I couldn't find where to buy new copies, but you might want to check
with
> Micro Focus to see if they have "old" copies for sale.
>
> This book uses "traditional" COBOL thinking to explain OO concepts.
>
>
> --
> Bill Klein
> wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com
This book is one of only two Cobol based books that I found helpful.
However
it was not enough for me. In particular I found the Factory concept not
well
explained. Also seeing how to do "OO concepts" using non-OO COBOL tends
to
reinforce the idea that OO is not really anything new or different and I
do
not think that is helpful. It doesn't give you the feel for a language
that has OO constructs built in and it doesn't give you a feell for the
patterns of use of those constructs.
The other book was Wilson Price's "Elements of Object Oriented COBOL".
While good on the whole I think students will come away thinking that OO
is
way too wordy and ***bersome. This is not really a fault of the book but
has more to do with how OO is implemented in COBOL.
However I personally understood both of these much better after learning
Java. C# would also be good, but I would stay away from C++ in the
beginning. I have had good experiences with books from Mike Murach. His
books usually have a lot of examples showing typical business application
examples:
http://www.murach.com/books/java.htm
http://www.murach.com/books/cs08/index.htm
A lot of books introduce the concepts of inheritance, interfaces and
composition so that you come away with some general understanding of them,
but the examples are such that you really don't have a feel for what to
use
when and the various tradeoffs with each.
The books "Head First Java" and "Head First Design Patterns" are very good
(be sure to get the latest versions). The latter might be too advanced
for
beginners but you might be able to use some of the animal examples (or
others) from it. It has some simple animal based examples based on flying
and quacking ducks and how to make/adapt a turkey to look like a duck etc.
I really enjoyed learning the examples in this book but get the errata and
chapter 9 on iterator and composite patterns contains some buggy code.
What
I really liked was how they took an initial example and kept improving it
using the OO design principles being introduced. Also it showed
interfaces,
inheritance and composition and when to prefer or choose on over the
other.
Mnay books say "favor composition over inheritance" but they don't give
concrete examples that allow you to see why. This one does. I guess it
sonewhat of a what comes first the chicke or the egg problem. You need
some
knowledge of OO concepts to understand OO design patterns but for me I
needed OO design patterns to appreciate how the concepts are used and to
see
some of their power.
Many people insist that it is better to learn OO design first and this
might
be a more language neutral approach. I don't know as I did not take that
approach and I personally sometimes have trouble understanding exactly
what
is meant without seeing a concrete example.
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