How do i get out of the habit of procedural programming and into object oriented programming?

Question

I\'m hoping to get some tips to kinda help me break out of what i consider after all these years a bad habit of procedural programming. Every time i attempt to do a project

Answer 1

Well, first off design patterns are about the worst thing to pattern your programming to.

It's just a big set of things. It's nothing to do with OOP, and most of them such as singleton are constantly used for all the wrong reasons (ie initialization). Some of these things you have to use so telling you about them is pointless, others are counterproductive, and the rest are just special case things. If you try to learn anything this way everything will start to look like some bizarre doodad someone came up with for a very special problem or because they needed infinite genericity (which is seldom true). Don't let people con you into using a million iterators and templates for no reason and make things ten times more complicated.

Really OOP is a simple subject that gets massively overcomplicated. Unfortunately in C++ it has a lot of issues but really simple virtual methods are what matters. Pure virtual base classes used much like a java interface object are the most useful but also just plain virtual methods here and there will come in handy.

It's mostly been overblown. It also doesn't lend itself well to every problem. If you make database and gui stuff it lends itself well to that. If you make system tools it is usually not as helpful.

Answer 2

I have found that a very intense way learning to train abstraction in programming is to build a OOP library with a defined functionality, and then to implement two projects with similar but still different requirements that are building on that library, at the same time.

This is very time-consuming and you need to have learned the basics of OOP first (S.Lott has some great links in the other answer). Constant refactoring and lots of "Doh!" moments are the rule; but I found this a great way to learn modular programming because everything I did was immediately noticeable in the implementation of one of the projects.

Answer 3

I think it´s important to learn the theory first. So reading a book would be a good start.

Answer 4

A great step would be to start of with a OOP framework, you can still write procedural code in the framework but over time you can refine your coding habits & start converting functionality into objects.

Also reading about patterns & data modeling will give you more ideas about to code your logic in a OOP style.

Answer 5

I found that one of the things which has really helped solidify the benefits of OOP for me has been writing unit tests with a mock object framework (such as EasyMock). Once you start to develop that way, you can see how classes help you isolate modules behind interfaces and also allow for easier testing.

One thing to keep in mind is that when people are first learning OOP, often there is an overemphasis on inheritance. Inheritance has its place, but it's a tool that can easily be overused. Composition or simple interface implementation are often better ways of doing things. Don't go so far in attempting to reuse code via inheritance that you make inheritance trees which make little sense from a polymorphism standpoint. The substitution principle is what makes inheritance/interface implementation powerful, not the fact that you can reuse code by subclassing.

Answer 6

Learn a new language, one that helps to move you gently to OOP. Java is nice, but a bit bloated, though. But its system library is mainly OO, so you are force to use objects. Moving to another language also helps you not to reuse your old code :-)