The Object Oriented Thought Process (Sams Professional) (Paperback)

All in all, I think this is a good book - given its scope. It seeks to explain simply and in plain English the essential concepts - mostly basic, but touching on the more advanced ideas - underpinning the basis of Object Oriented Programming (OOP).

As such, it succeeds admirably. The author is experienced as a programmer and writes well. He does not try to burden the reader with difficult concepts and gets the absolute essentials well. Where he doesn't go into detail he refers the reader on to other books which do.

Note, however, that this title doesn't aim to examine OOP in depth. This was never the author's intention and so he can hardly be faulted for that. Rather, what Weisfeld is trying to do (and, I think, he succeeds about 90% of the way) is to get people unused to thinking in an object oriented way into the necessary mindset. As a result, I was fairly pleased with this book. A careful (and easy) read confirmed what I knew and cleared up most of what I didn't of the basics.

Where I would criticise the book - and why it only gets 4 stars rather than 5 - is in its execution. As the first reader hints, this title could perhaps have been 10-20% longer and explained some key extensions of OO thinking in greater depth (i.e. UML and the implementation process are both covered in a very cursory way) . And while I'm happy to go to other books after having read this, I felt it would have been better to have these "extensions" more tightly integrated into this title.

After all, the purpose of reading this title is to explain the conceptual "Why" of Object Orientation, and that includes the implementation issues as well as a (clear) description of the concepts.

Overall, a good book and useful for those who don't know much about object orientation.

* This book can be read very quickly
* This book has pictures in it which helps break up the text
* A lot of the explanations of concepts are done very intuitively and well
* Introduction of UML as a language-neutral implementation of the concepts is good

A few negative thoughts:

* The author's prose style is extremely repetitive - a bit like being taught in a primary school: To do ABC we do XYZ. In other words, doing XYZ will bring about ABC, or to put it another way, ABC will achieve XYZ. What we are basically saying is that XYZ-ing is the best way to ABC. This gets annoying. I got a strong impression that the author was trying very hard to fill up the pages. If you've ever read the O'Reilly book on Information Architecture you'll know what I mean.
* The text doesn't appear to have been edited at all. It's littered with typos both in the body and the code samples.
* The pictures merely aggregate the text inside really dodgy clipart - they never actually add anything to the explanations. Some of them are laughably gratuitous. Once again I got a strong impression of page-filling.
* The target audience is unclear. There are lots of code samples in Java (with many typos and syntax errors). This is fine if you already know some Java syntax, but the book's supposed to be about the OO thought process, not Java.
* Many of the concepts aren't dealt with in much detail at all. This isn't a problem in an introductory text as long as there's enough to make them understandable. In some instances I could tell that the only reason I got what he was saying was because I had read about it before - less repetition and more content would have gone down really well to nail down certain concepts.