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Title:Object-Oriented Software Construction
Author:Bertrand Meyer
Summary:Simply put, the most authoritative, scholarly reference on O-O concepts and architectures written to date.
Bookstore:
Focus:O-O Concepts and Architecture, Eiffel
Audience:Architects
Style:The author writes with the precision of a philosopher or mathematician. While not an easy read, if the reader is patient and reads carefully, he or she will be amply rewarded with the satisfaction provided by Bertrand Meyer's formal definitions of O-O concepts and terminology.
Difficulty:Advanced
Quotes:"Such examples are the combination and culmination of the O-O method’s unique abstraction facilities: classes, information hiding, Single Choice, inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic binding, deferred classes... You manipulate objects without knowing their exact types, specifying only the minimum information necessary to ensure the availability of the operations that you require (here, that these objects are figures, so that they can be rotated and displayed). Having secured the type checker’s stamp of approval, certifying that these operations are consistent with your declarations, you rely on a benevolent power — dynamic binding — to apply the correct version of each operation, without having to find out what that version will be."

"This downplaying of ordering constraints is part of object technology’s constant push for decentralization in system architectures. The emphasis is not on 'the' execution of 'the' program ... but on the services provided by a set of classes through their features. The order in which the services will be exercised, during the execution of a particular system built from these classes, is a secondary property."

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