I thought I was becoming comfortable with OO until I ran into a group of Smalltalkers. What a mind bender! I learned things about OO that I didn't know. I also became concerned as, ostensibly for reuse purposes, the design stage decoupled logically unrelated functionality and fragmented real-world objects far beyond their natural granularity, to the point that I found myself mired in bitty components and methods with so little responsibility that I could no longer see the big picture. Worse, those myriad components now had complex interrelationships, most of which I could no longer see. I fully agreed that reuse was a worthy goal - but at the expense of readability and maintainability? Paul G. Bassett not only identifies and describes all of these issues (and much more), he has concrete solutions to these problems, with bottom line statistics to back up some pretty wild claims. His book is small - initially a concern for me. Don't worry. Paul G. Bassett is clear, concise, correct, complete. This, I strongly believe, is where we're headed.