Book Review: Matt Weisfeld: The Object-Oriented Thought Process

Today I'll write a quick review of the ambitiously titled The Object-Oriented Thought Process (3rd Edition) (Developer's Library).

Just by browsing through the table of contents (which is always a nice way to start thinking about buying or reading a book), you'll see that this book attempts to cover a lot of ground. In fact, on the second edition cover, the subtitle said "An introduction to object-oriented concepts for programmers looking to master modern application development tools, including Java and .NET" (my emphasis), but thankfully, they decided to remove that :). In reality, this book scratches the very surface of a lot of facets of "modern application development", but lacks any depth that could lead you to mastering anything. What you get is basically a lesson in object-oriented terminology. You'll hear about classes, objects, encapsulation, inheritance, composition and all the usual suspects, and then see a few (standard and very artificial) examples modeled with CRC cards and UML.

Unfortunately, the book then gets sidetracked into relational databases, XML, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JavaBeans, CORBA and Web Services (you get about two to three pages about each). Finally, there's a twenty page chapter on design patterns that tells you what they are and lists a few. You can skip this whole part.

To it's credit, the book is short, well written and (for the most part) correct. If you've just heard of object-oriented programming this book will give you a nice overview of what it's about, and possibly keep you from forming some misconceptions. On the other hand, if you're already familiar with OOP, you won't really benefit much. I also think this might be a good book for people who aren't really planing on being developers but will be talking to developers in their work (like managers and marketers) as it is lightweight enough and doesn't really require previous knowledge (there's some Java and C# code in there, but it's very basic and not very important either). Finally, since this book doesn't hold any value as a reference and reading it more then once doesn't make much sense, if you want to read it, I recommend you lend it at the library and save some money. :)