How To Learn OO Concepts
Welcome, New-to-OO Developer#
So you probably reached this page because you were looking for help with SL-275 lab work. (If you got here by some other mysterious path, I'd love to know about it.)
If you're really feeling a bit lost with the OO side of the Java Programming course (and not just browsing around to kill time,) allow me to try and ease your pain.
Over the past 25 years I've taught many, many friends, colleagues and paying customers the elements of object-oriented design and programming. Or, more importantly, the key concepts of OO Thinking. And there are a few harsh realities to the thing...
- No 3-day "Intro to OO" course is going to turn anybody, no matter how genius, into a skilled OO designer. Not even mine.
- There is a small percentage of programmers - typically coming from structured-programming and 4GL environments - who are never going to become OO thinkers.
- Access to an experienced OO designer acting as mentor greatly speeds learning, and ensures better design quality sooner rather than the slower path of experience gained through bitter (and often expensive) war-wounds.
So All OO Courses Are Useless?#
No. They do serve a purpose: they provide the foundation for further learning, introducing participants to the key concepts and jargon.
Sadly a great many such courses are of questionably quality. To really add value, a course must include a great deal of hands-on, practical exposure to clarify and reinforce the concepts and make them concrete.
I'll Never "Get" OO!#
You may be tempted to think, "I must be one of the minority who are never going to grok OO. So it's OK for me to give up now!"
Not true! The flipside to this observation is that better than 90% of developers can and do successfully learn to apply object oriented thinking in software design and development. But it does take time and some perseverance.
And it is completely unpredictable who will eventually figure it out and who won't until they actually try. Frequently I have been surprised and proven wrong. Age, experience, technical background and education all fail to provide any useful indicators. The reality is that using object-oriented concepts as a way of thinking about code development and software design is much more natural to the human brain than structured-programming ever was. It is the process of unlearning that takes time.
In truth, it takes about 9 months for almost everybody to fully grasp OO Think.
A Mentor Helps#
It can be a pretty lonely path, if you attempt it by yourself, and you can vastly improve your progress and the quality of your design work if you can work with an experienced OO designer as mentor. Contact me to see how we can structure a mentoring program for you. Through the Wonder Of The Internet we can arrange a program of structured assignments and interactions that do not require travel to keep things cost-effective. Minimum group size of 6 people required.
