Overview
Rather than taking the more traditional procedural approach, the authors take an object-oriented approach to teach introductory programming concepts. In the first six chapters, this text teaches all of the primary object-oriented concepts, including virtual methods and polymorphism. Focusing on how one uses objects well, Connor, Niguidula, and van Dam concentrate on building programs from a library of objects. The authors' goal is to help students get off on the right foot when programming. Even at this introductory level, the authors encourage students to think about programming in the long term, rather than to build something for just one assignment. The text encourages re-use of objects, and thoroughly covers the development of classes and methods. Also, the text introduces the concepts of messages sent from one object to another and encourages students to consider the communication paths among instances in their program design. Finally, the authors use an object-oriented approach to standard introductory concepts of data structures and algorithms in the last chapters.
Rather than taking the more traditional "procedural" approach, the authors take an object-oriented approach from the start to teach introductory programming concepts. Focusing on effective use of objects, they concentrate on building programs from an object library, reusing the objects, and developing classes and methods.