''Object-Oriented Software Construction'', also called OOSC, is a book by
Bertrand Meyer
Bertrand Meyer (; ; born 21 November 1950) is a French academic, author, and consultant in the field of computer languages. He created the Eiffel programming language and the concept of design by contract.
Education and academic career
Meyer ...
, widely considered a foundational text of
object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impl ...
. The first edition was published in 1988; the second edition, extensively revised and expanded (more than 1300 pages), in 1997. Many translations are available including Dutch (first edition only), French (1+2), German (1), Italian (1), Japanese (1+2), Persian (1), Polish (2), Romanian (1), Russian (2), Serbian (2), and Spanish (2). The book has been cited thousands of times. , The
Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) ''Guide to Computing Literature'' counts 2,233 citations,
for the second edition alone in computer science journals and technical books; Google Scholar lists 7,305 citations. , the book is number 35 in the list of all-time most cited works (books, articles, etc.) in computer science literature, with 1,260 citations.
The book won a
Jolt award in 1994.
The second edition is available online free.
''Unless otherwise indicated, descriptions below apply to the second edition.''
Focus
The book presents object technology as an answer to major issues of software engineering, with a special emphasis on addressing the software quality factors of correctness, robustness, extendibility and reusability. It starts with an examination of the issues of software quality, then introduces
abstract data types as the theoretical basis for object technology and proceeds with the main object-oriented techniques:
classes,
objects,
genericity,
inheritance
Inheritance is the practice of receiving private property, titles, debts, entitlements, privileges, rights, and obligations upon the death of an individual. The rules of inheritance differ among societies and have changed over time. Offi ...
,
Design by Contract,
concurrency, and
persistence. It includes extensive discussions of methodological issues.
Table of contents
Notation
The first edition of the book used the
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs.
Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...
Eiffel for the examples and served as a justification of the language design choices for Eiffel. The second edition also uses Eiffel as its notation, but in an effort to separate the notation from the concepts it does not name the language until the Epilogue, on page 1162, where ''Eiffel'' appears as the last word. A few months after publication of the second edition, a reader posted on
Usenet
Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...
his discovery that the book's 36 chapters alternatively start with the letters ''E'', ''I'', ''F'', ''F'', ''E'', ''L'', a pattern being repeated 6 times. Also, in the Appendix, titled "Epilogue, In Full Frankness Exposing the Language" (in first initials), the first letters of each paragraph spell the same pattern.
See also
*
Uniform access principle
References
*
*
External links
*{{Official website, bertrandmeyer.com/OOSC2, Bertrand Meyer (author), free online 2nd edition 1997 isbn 978-0136291558
Book's page at Eiffel SoftwareBertrand Meyer's publication page
1988 non-fiction books
1997 non-fiction books
Object-oriented programming
Software engineering books
Prentice Hall books