How do i get out of the habit of procedural programming and into object oriented programming?

Question

I\'m hoping to get some tips to kinda help me break out of what i consider after all these years a bad habit of procedural programming. Every time i attempt to do a project

Answer 1

1. I believe that the mechanics of OOP seem completely arbitrary and make no sense until you read a book on design patterns and understand the "why" of it. I recommend Head First Design Patterns. I thought OOP was ridiculous and completely useless until I picked up this book and saw what it was actually good for.

2. OO makes a lot more sense when you understand function pointers and how it relates to indirect function calls and late binding. Play around with function pointers in C, C++, or D for a little while and get a feel for what they're for and how they work. The polymorphism/virtual function part of OO is just another layer of abstraction on top of this.

3. Procedural is the right tool for some jobs. Don't act like it's wrong. IMHO all three major paradigms (procedural, OO, functional) are valuable even at a fine-grained level, within a single module. I tend to prefer:

Procedural is good when my problem is simple (or I've already factored it enough with functional and OO that I now have a subproblem that I consider simple) and I want the most straightforward solution without a lot of abstraction getting in the way.

Object-oriented is good when my problem is more complex and has lots of state that makes sense in the context of the problem domain. In these cases the existence of state is not an implementation detail, but the exact representation is one that I prefer to abstract away.

Functional is good when my problem is complex but has no state that makes sense at the level of the problem domain. From the perspective of the problem domain, the existence of state is an implementation detail.