Object Oriented Course Introduction


	Lesson 1 Object Oriented Course introduction
		Welcome to Introduction to Object-Oriented Design. This course focuses on the fundamental ideas that make up object-oriented programming (OOP, for short). You will design a simple object oriented program according to object-oriented principles and learn how to document your object oriented designs using uml diagrams. Course goals After completing this course, you will be able to create design specifications that demonstrate the essentials of OOP, including: How classes allow programmers to define their own data types How messages are passed between objects with methods How to separate interfaces from implementation using access protection How to guarantee that variables are initialized with constructors How to reuse code via inheritance How polymorphism allows the same message to be sent to different objects In the next lesson, the prerequisites for the course including C++ and Java will be discussed. In object-oriented programming, polymorphism refers to a programming language's ability to process objects differently depending on their data type or class. More specifically, it is the ability to redefine methods for derived classes. For example, given a base class shape, polymorphism enables the programmer to define different area methods for any number of derived classes, such as circles, rectangles and triangles. No matter what shape an object is, applying the area method to it will return the correct results. Polymorphism is considered to be a requirement of any true object-oriented programming language (OOPL).