Object-oriented software design and construction with C++

Audience
This book is intended for undergraduate students. It is assumed that the reader has had a single preceding programming course. Students at Virginia Tech use this book in a first semester sophomore year course. In particular, only an understanding of basic data structures (e.g., linked lists, stacks) is needed, and that only in the second half of the course. A specific course on data structures in not required.
It is assumed that the basic syntax of "C" is known, or at least learned independently of this book. Only a basic familiarity with "C" is required; it is not; necessary to be an expert in this language. A person competent in a statically typed procedural language other than "C" should be able to understand most of what is contained in these pages. Doing the programming exercises, of course, requires at least a minimal proficiency with "C."
The motivating examples and programming exercises do not; assume. familiarity with concepts or intuitions derived from experiences that would normally only occur during the junior or senior years of study. The problems are drawn from common graphical user interface (GUI) systems. Anyone who bas used a GUI-based document preparation system, spreadsheet, drawing tool, or the like has the necessary context.
Intent
The most important intent of this book is to support a person's study of object oriented programming in C++. While only the C++ language is described, the object-oriented concepts on which C++ is based are realized in numerous other object-oriented programming languages. The initial chapter describes the broad concepts of object-oriented programming without specific reference to C++ and gives pointers to other programming languages. The broader object-oriented context is also reflected by the use of terms from different languages and analysis methods. For example, the terms "member function," "method," "operation," and "action" are used interchangeably. While distinctions can be drawn between these terms, the distinctions are not a real difference for beginning students object-oriented programming.
An important secondary intent is that of raising the student's level of programming competence by emphasizing

• reuse: The value of software reuse is conveyed by initial and pervasive reuse of software in the presentation, exercises, and projects. In fact, no exercise calls for the development of a program "from scratch." Almost all exercises use a provided set of classes and, later, an extensive class library.
• tools: The tools and practices needed to develop systems are presented in addition to the language features. Knowing the language and writing the code is only half of what is required to build a real system. Developers must also cope with testing, debugging, project planning, and project management. While these are ideas that are often covered in a senior-level software engineering course, the foundations for that more advanced study are established here.
• GUI library: Through the exercises and projects, students learn about an object-oriented library for building GUI-based systems. The library is intended to become part of the student's toolkit, being used in programming projects in subsequent courses. While a specific library is studied, the knowledge can be easily transferred to other similar class libraries.
• event-driven systems: Exposure is given to event-driven systems. Beginning programming courses typically deal with problems where the program being written is totally in control at run-time. However, in event-driven systems the program is not in total control. Instead, the program reacts to external events. Seeing event-driven systems broadens the student's experience and perspective, and provides a source for intuitions useful in later courses on operating systems, computer architecture, networking, and similar courses that involve asynchronous events.