Skip to main content

OOP Basics


For this week’s blog on software design, I chose to watch a video presented by Dr. Steve Bagley on some fundamentals of object oriented programming (OOP). I’m embarrassed to say that although I am taking several upper-level computer science classes, I am unsure I would be able to give a good definition of what object oriented design was. To be fair though, it has been several years since I have taken CS 101, and it seemed like such a foreign concept at the time.

I felt silly learning about something so elementary again, but it made a lot more sense when I’ve had as much exposure to OOP as I have now. For the video, he uses a game of “Pong” as an example of how OOP might use objects to represent the “ball” and “paddles.” From there, he talked some about inheritance and touched on a few more topics, albeit briefly.

The main reason why I didn’t understand the benefit of this way of programming is that I didn’t know how else you would do it. I didn’t realize that without declaring objects, how difficult it would be to keep track of everything and make everything work properly. 

This video was made for someone who might be interested in computers, but this is not their specialty. Although this was helpful for me in getting a better background on what OOP is, I felt it did not go far enough. I would have liked it if it went a step further and explained some of the next topics that would logically follow. The video was under fifteen minutes, and most of the videos in the channel are that length, so there wasn’t that much room to expand. 

He said that he would go over the topics like inheritance in another video, but I searched through all the videos with him, but I could not find the “OOP part two” or anything of that nature. I don’t like that the channel doesn’t cater to people with a computer science background, but on the other hand, there are some interesting looking videos that I would like to watch after this. My next step will be to learn about functional programming because I do not have any experience in that area.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Testing: Like Destroying Sandcastles

https://joecolantonio.com/testtalks/223-testing-dream-journaling-smashing-sand-castles-with-noemi-ferrera/ In this blog for software quality assurance and testing, I decided to return to the “Test Talks” podcast, presented by Joe Colantonio, for another episode (#223). In it, he sat down with Noemi Ferrera, a software tester for a Chinese mobile gaming company to get her take on the subject. Noemi gave a few interesting metaphors that I appreciated for how to look at testing. In one, she gave the example of going to a movie where you had already read the book. It was different than how you imagined it while reading it, and testing is a way of making the “movie version” fit the way you envisioned it playing out.  The other metaphor for testing that she gave was, if you were children at the beach, the developers would be the ones building the sandcastles, whereas the testers would be the ones destroying them. I don’t know if that would be the most accurate way of lookin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Decorator Design Pattern

For this week's blog on Software Design, I decided to watch a short tutorial on one of the design patterns I didn't pick for a previous assignment. I picked Proxy Design pattern to cover before, and now I'm going back to learn about Decorator Design Pattern. It is only a thirteen minute video, so I won't be going as deep as I would had I picked it for the assignment. I am also going to talk about my reflections on it rather than create a tutorial, so I am not going to reteach it to the person reading this blog post. The tutorial I chose was made by Derek Banas on YouTube. He used an example of a pizza parlor to illustrate the wrong way to code it by using inheritance. He shows the problem with this because you would have to create a very large number of subclasses for all your objects (in this case pizzas). Composition, on the other hand, is a dynamic way of modifying objects. Instead of creating as many subclasses, you add functionality at run time. It has th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Facade Design Pattern

For this week’s blog on Software Architecture and Design, I will revisit the same assignment that I have blogged about before. For the assignment, I had the option between three design patterns to write a tutorial for. I picked the proxy design pattern, and then I blogged about the decorator design pattern. Now, I would like to watch a tutorial on the third design pattern, facade, so that I might learn about all three. I chose to use the same YouTube, Derek Banas, that I used before for the other blog. I found his videos engaging and informative that I would like to learn about it again. I also like that it is fairly concise (11.5 min), which makes it much easier to rewatch sections that I don’t get the first time around.  It turns out that I did not understand it after finishing Derek’s video, so I turned to another video by another Youtube channel by Christopher Okhravi. Derek went straight into coding, whereas Christopher just drew diagrams and did not code. I needed m...
Post a Comment
Read more