David Scott Bernstein is the author of Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software. It’s an insider’s view of the software industry drawn from his decades of hands-on experience as a software developer, trainer, and consultant to some of the biggest players in the business. David’s continuing passion for software design and construction has led him to train more than 8,000 developers since 1989 at hundreds of companies worldwide, including Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft—where his book’s advice has been successfully applied. His consulting firm, To Be Agile (http://ToBeAgile.com), helps developers adopt Extreme Programming practices such as test-first development, pair programming, and refactoring.
One crucial difference between writing object-oriented software and writing procedural software is the notion of object construction. Objects must be instantiated before they can be used. This is more than a technical detail; it is at the very core of OO's usefulness.A key distinction—and therefore opportunity—of object-oriented programming over procedural programming is that objects have two phas...