Object Design

After more than ten years, object technology pioneer Rebecca Wirfs-Brock teams with expert Alan McKean to present a thoroughly updated, modern, and proven method for the design of software. The book is packed with practical design techniques that enable the practitioner to get the job done. Like many human endeavors, design is part art, part engineering, part guesswork, and part experimentation. Discipline, hard work, inspiration, and sound technique all play their part as well. For any given problem, there are many reasonable, but only a few very good solutions. The authors’ goal is to help readers learn to make those very good design decisions on their own. The book explores challenges that software developers will face as they build their design, and shows how design patterns can be used to solve design problems. Long awaited and eagerly anticipated, this book represents the first great software design book of the century. A FUTURE CLASSIC!

Table of Contents

1 Design Concepts

2 Responsibility-Driven Design

3 Finding Objects

4 Responsibilities

5 Collaborations

6 Control Style

7 Describing Collaborations

8 Reliable Collaborations

9 Flexibility

10 On Design

About the Authors

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock is founder of Wirfs-Brock Associates. She consults with clients on actual architecture and design projects as well as development practices and methods. She is the originator of the set of development practices known as Responsibility-Driven Design. Among her widely used inventions are use case conversations and object role stereotypes. She was lead author of the classic work Designing Object-Oriented Software (Prentice-Hall, 1990).

Alan McKean is a respected object technology educator and cofounder of Wirfs-Brock Associates. His classes have introduced thousands of developers to object-oriented design and programming and his instructional techniques have been widely adopted by other educators. An experienced programmer, speaker, and instructor, Alan has developed curricula in object-oriented design, programming, and distributed object systems.