Thinking Well about OO Design

Good object-oriented design is hard. Unfortunately, most people don't know how hard it is. The best way to improve your OO design is to ask hard questions about it. And the best way to know which questions to ask is to read people who have thought deeply about where OO sits in the design space: what it is good at and what it is not good at, what you can do to minimize the effects of the things it is not good at, and how best to use the tools it gives you. Design Patterns is a great place to start (read it more than once), and I've found these recent articles to be helpful in getting me to think well about OO design:

• Inheritance is Evil
• Not All Functions should be Object Methods