I understand Classes, Objects etc but find difficult to write OO applications

[thepreacher]

I have mostly been self taught when it comes to programming. I first started with COBOL (no, it doesn't give my age away. It just happens that the guy who got me interested in programming was a COBOL programmer and that was the language he got me started on. Then I got into HTML, JavaScript, and then PHP. I have bought quite a few books of software engineering and programming and as most of the books i bought used C and C++ as examples that led me to get myself acquainted with those languages as well but not to any deep level.

I know what a class is, encapsulation, inheritance, destructors, constructors, objects, pass-by-reference and by-value etc. But give me a specification and application I will turn out will be procedural to a large degree. I know about entities (anything that can have more than one occurrence may be classified as an entity).

Can someone help me or direct me to a book that can help me learn how to break a specification down into its modules, class’s entities, database-tables etc.

My main language is PHP btw. Thanks and God Bless.

[VGR]

in the spec, or from the spec, you should be able to deduce an entity-relation schema. This will be the basis of your OO approach. Personally, I find "good" programming (ie, structured programming) more efficient than OOP. My advice is to use OOP only when needed. For instance, if your spec doesn't describe a system where entities are derived from basic types (ie, classes) and don't share (ie, inherit) attributes, then it's pretty pointless to use OOA/OOD. Use normal structured design techniques. You'll save a lot of your time. regards