Anyone have any good books to recommend on how to do oop the right way? Notice I''m not asking for a C++ book; THAT isn''t my difficulty. Academics at Purdue have failed to give me what I consider important grounding in proper oop coding; All they appear to concentrate on is the syntax. As such, I''ve shyed away from using C++ for my own personal projects, as I don''t feel comfortable using a programming paradigm I''m not all that familiar with. Now, though, my projects are reaching the complexity level where I would really benefit from some oo lovin''. So... any book recommendations? C=64

Oddly, I''ve been cruising around about.com''s C++ area and have seen many interesting tutorials, online books, and links that would be of great interest to you. Check it out.

The book "Design Patterns" by the famous ''gang of four'' is the best OOP book on the planet ... It''s published by Addison-Wesley .... BUY IT! ... but it is an intermediate to advanced book ... buy it now ... attempt it ... but do not get upset when you get a little lost ... and feel free to skip section 2 completely ... BUT read section one completely first...

Now, there are many books which help to prepare someone for the Design Patterns book, but I do not know any one which really excels, or covers everything ... so i recomend first browsing through your C++ books until you have an understanding of inheiritence, polymorphism, encapsulation, data hiding, and abstract data types ... or look for these topics in the table of contents or index of books at the book store.

THEN ... move on to books related to OOP or OOAD (Object Oriented Analysis and Design), a particularly good source of this type of information can be found in books on Object Oriented Modeling ... such as provided by OMT diagrams, or more recently by UML (unified modeling language).

Good Luck

There is no "right" way to do OOP. Use the parts you want, don''t use the parts you don''t want.

The bottom line is how well it works for your game.

I, for one, almost never use private: and protected:. I just don''t need ''em most of the time.

"Design Patterns"! That''s the name I was trying to remember. Thanks Xai. Someone else had recommended it to me, but alas, I neglected to write that down.

I hope I didn''t leave you all with the imperssion that I''m unfamiliar with C++ or OOP in general. I''m QUITE comfortable with the concepts of OOP, it''s just that I feel they''re pretty easy to use "improperly". I have done coding in Java, as well. Hell, as an evil experiment, my compiler course was done completely in Java (I call it an evil experiment because this was the first time most of the people in the class had been exposed to Java, and trying to learn compiler design with limited documentation and an alpha book wasn''t the best of situations).

I''ve heard of UML, but exactly is it?

C=64

UML is the industry notation standard for object modelling. You can kind of think of it as a the accepted ''language'' for speaking to each other about object oriented software and processes.

Just as the English language does not dictate whether you write non-fiction or poetry, UML does not dictate HOW you go about creating object models. UML only specifies the symbols and artifacts (types of documents) you should use.

If you are going to pursue OOA or OOD you basically have to be somewhat familiar with UML, because all of the more recent books and software dealing with OO related topics use UML (most of the software also supports previous notation standards such as OMT or Booch).

You can find more about it here at http://www.rational.com/uml/index.jtmpl