Relevant Logic

About the OOP Book

by the author

I've been interested in REALbasic's Object Oriented Programming features for some time. REALbasic is a fascinating tool, not least because it is approachable to domain experts-folks who know what a program needs to do for them-who are not necessarily programmers.

Non-programmers will often write much better programs from a usability standpoint, but wouldn't get the best grade at programming school. This is fine, though, because much of how to use REALbasic is so obvious and beginner-friendly. And we wind up with an amiable and mixed developer community, using REALbasic to write solutions to every problem under the sun.

On the other hand, REALbasic also has some depth to it, particularly because it has powerful Object Oriented Programming features. Unfortunately the REALbasic documentation and the other books that are on the market about REALbasic don't really explain how to use OOP effectively, and no wonder: it's quite a subtle discipline, as evidenced by the length of this book.

So it seemed to me that someone ought to write a book on the subject. And since I've given well-received presentations about OOP at the past two REAL World conferences (I'm scheduled to present again in '07), I figured that I might as well do it.

It also seemed to me that it was challenging writing a book on REALbasic in general, because its features change so quickly that your book is soon out of date. But the OOP features change more slowly, and I could keep an electronic book up to date when they did.

So I embarked on the project a little over a year ago. Circumstances kept me from finishing it until now, but it's done, and I hope you find it useful. You can teach yourself most of what REALbasic can do, but getting over the "hump" of how OOP works is not something you can easily learn alone. If you do learn it, your complex programs will be significantly easier to write and maintain. It's that simple.

Barring a remarkable change in REALbasic's OOP features very soon, I intend to release free book updates to purchasers of this book for some time to come.

I also hope you send me feedback (the address is in the book). Savage criticism is much more useful to me than great praise. Ideally, I'll get a good deal of feedback soon after the book is released, so any part of it that is hard to understand will be improved. I would like to make it the best book it can be as soon as I can.

Enjoy.

Guyren G Howe

"Object Oriented Programming with REALbasic" is about 30,000 words, about 150 6x9 pages, and is concerned only with Object Oriented Programming with REALbasic.