Michelle --

A couple resources that address using OO effectively in the act of programming.

Not sure if you had a chance to take in Steve Sawyer's presentation on Refactoring at DevCon or Whilfest, but his is a wonderful, self-reflective approach towards programming in an OO style.

As he mentioned, the term Refactoring and at least part of his inspiration was a recent book by Martin Fowler, Refactoring, publ by Addison-Wesley. I picked that up a couple weeks ago, and it's the first programming book that I could say grabs me like a detective novel. Hard to put down!

He talks about doing object oriented design in the process of programming. Program development tends towards disorganization as we start from a good plan, but make changes in coding without changing the design, and do kludges to get things working. He suggests continually "refactoring" -- that is rewriting code with the goal of enhancing the organization. Some of it is familiar from writing well-structured procedural code, but much is new in being fully aware of design patterns, etc. The steps are simple and easy to follow (though the code is in Java). The overall impact, though has been significant on my programming practice.

Maybe it's just hitting me at the right point, but I think it addresses what you're looking for.

As for the time spent and the state of confusion -- I think that's just a product of trying to work effectively with a different mindset. I've been working with this stuff for several years and its only now beginning to make sense as a tool that I can use effectively and creatively.

Jay



>Well, I read the article and while I kind of understand it an abstract level, I'm still lost when it comes to how to code this stuff. I'm getting frustrated because I've spent nearly 50 hours trying to learn real OOP and I'm still having lots of trouble coding it. I need to figure this out.
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>Now obviously I can't expect the people on the UT to teach me everything and you've all been wonderful helping me through this. What I'm wondering is if there's any good resources out there that bridge the gap between getting this abstractly and knowing how to code it? Any good examples of actual code I could look at. I'd do a web search if I had some idea what to search on. Unfortunately, google won't understand "show me good programming examples". :)
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>Thanks,
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>Michelle
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>>When Andy and I were grappling with this problem, we just created a formatter object that was capable of dishing up cursors as either XML or ADO recordsets. That way, the front end, whatever it was, could request the data format that it wanted from the data access object. It worked out rather neatly for us.
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>>I hope that you will find it helpful. The whole reason I wrote it was because I had an A-HA moment when I was wrestling with a problem that was very similar to the one that you are dealing with now.
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>>Good luck.