Name: Object-oriented design heuristics
ISBN: 9780201633856

Object-oriented design heuristics

Object-Oriented Design Heuristics offers insight into object-oriented design improvement. The more than sixty guidelines presented in this book are language-independent and allow you to rate the integrity of a software design. The heuristics are not written as hard and fast rules; they are meant to serve as warning mechanisms which allow the flexibility of ignoring the heuristic as necessary. This tutorial-based approach, born out of the author's extensive experience developing software, teaching thousands of students, and critiquing designs in a variety of domains, allows you to apply the guidelines in a personalized manner. The heuristics cover important topics ranging from classes and objects (with emphasis on their relationships including association, uses, containment, and both single and multiple inheritance) to physical object-oriented design. You will gain an understanding of the synergy that exists between design heuristics and the popular concept of design patterns; heuristics can highlight a problem in one facet of a design while patterns can provide the solution. Programmers of all levels will find value in this book. The newcomer will discover a fast track to understanding the concepts of object-oriented programming. At the same time, experienced programmers seeking to strengthen their object-oriented development efforts will appreciate the insightful analysis.

What Hacker News says

specialistMay 2025

> No inheritence.

Yup. Prefer composition over inheritance.

Such a hard sell during the heyday of OOAD. UML, Fusion, RUP, blahblahblah.

Having previous experience with LISP, it just seemed obvious, barely worth mentioning. Definitely set me apart from my colleagues.

FWIW: Our local design pattern study group tackled Arthur J. Riel's Object-Oriented Design Heuristics [1996] https://archive.org/details/objectorientedde0000riel https://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Design-Heuristics-Art... Which might be the earliest published pushback against all that overwrought enterprisey ThoughtWorks-style brainrot.

> No ... dependency injection

Yes and: Mocks (mocking?) is a code stench. Just flip the ownership relationship(s). As Riel, and surely many others, have laboriously explained, to a mostly uncaring world.

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mbwghOct 2023

In addition to 'A philosophy of Software Design', I would also recommend the less well known 'Object-Oriented Design Heuristics'.

It came out at the same time as the GoF book, but I think it is still relevant today and similar in spirit to Ousterhout's book.

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keithnoizuMay 2019

Possibly more abstract than what you are looking for but Object-Oriented Design Heuristics is a decent text.

https://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Design-Heuristics-Art...

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specialistApr 2016

I will never use Java's Optional. I'm baffled why it even exists. Further, I remain unclear on the value (haha) of the @Nullable and @NotNull annotations. If it's not baked into the language, why bother?

I've been using NullObject since (checking...) 1996. This is The Correct Answer.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NullObject

I first read about NullObject here:

Object-Oriented Design Heuristics http://amzn.to/1ND1YSU

What'd be really neat is some mojo to remove the boilerplate of implementing NullObjects.

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kriroDec 2012

How does the Smalltalk book compare to "Object-Oriented Software Construction" by Meyer? The latter is my goto OO book (in combination with "Object Oriented Design Heuristics" by Riel)

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briandollDec 2010

Object-Oriented Design Heuristics: http://amzn.to/hMfVA6

This is a fantastic book on OOP design principals and has lots of language-agnostic examples.

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