Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design

Chapter 8. Design Principles: Originality is Overrated

Imitation is the sincerest form of not being stupid.

There’s nothing as satisfying as coming up with a completely new and original solution to a problem that’s been troubling you for days—until you find out someone else solved the same problem, long before you did, and did an even better job than you did! In this chapter, we’re going to look at some design principles that people have come up with over the years, and how they can make you a better programmer. Lay aside your thoughts of “doing it your way”; this chapter is about doing it the smarter, faster way.

Design principle roundup

So far, we’ve really been concentrating on all the things that you do before you start coding your application. Gathering requirements, analysis, writing out feature lists, and drawing use case diagrams. Of course, at some point you actually are going to have to write some code. And that’s where design principles really come into play.

Note

A design principle is a basic tool or technique that can be applied to designing or writing code to make that code more maintainable, flexible, or extensible.

You’ve already seen a few design principles in earlier chapters:

Using proven OO design principles results in more maintainable, flexible, and extensible software. ...