Objects how they fit together?

Question

So how important are objects from day one and howcome books dont encourage thier use from the start?
Reason I ask is as I am making a phonebook application should I be making a class for example getPersonalDetails and then save that and reuse it for possibly and address book? Also do you create methods as you go along and must you import a whole class everytime you need it or is it sometimes better to code an internal method if you only need one? Is the concept of OOP to break everything down to its smallest part?
An example would be if my phone book needed a name surname home work cell details then I code a GetDetails class that has methods for getting all those details. But possibly an adress book might only be using 2 of those methods to get name and surname so should i make internal methods or create a object of that class to access those methods that are already coded?
I guess I am trying to ask if you always reuse or if it is preferable to create a new internal method at times?

Answer 1

newark wrote:
nclow wrote:
If I am teaching someone who is completely new to programming how to code in Java, I would not start out by immediately introducing Objects. Teaching a student about variables, assignments, program control flow, functions, primitive structures, editing program files, manual compiling, and the fundamental nature of what a program is should come first, IMHO. I've been convinced of this by teaching experience in which I have seen programming novices absolutely ruined and completely lost in the material 2 months in because the teachers thought a head-first plunge into OOP was the best way to start.I respectfully disagree. Complete beginners to programming are not wired to think like computers. But living in the real world, objects make sense to them. Teaching them what an object is, and how objects interact with one another, is a very beginner-friendly task. Have beginners create a Car object with fields like "year" and "model", and methods like getYear() and they'll have easily accomplished a first program. Then show them how to make a loop that creates multiple cars, or use an If statement to look for a specific car. You'll get more people hooked into programming if the first tasks give positive reinforcement, versus the arduous task of walking a beginner through debugging his for loop on day 1.
But I guess that's all dependent on whether you want there to be more programmers, or if you want to weed out those who aren't immediately committed on the first day.It's quite true that OOP has a lot of fertile ground for a student to relate to. Objects and classes can be understood relatively easily even by novices. Unfortunately, a lot of instructors seem to then go right ahead into inheritance, interfaces, polymorphism, and all manner of complicated concepts before a student even knows how to write a loop. Despite favoring the Java language a great deal, I'm particularly disdainful of "Java shops" for this reason, because the product is often a student who has no mastery at all of the basics, and ends up struggling greatly. I'm not sure what's so horribly arduous about building a for loop versus building an object, and I consider a for loop to be more of a fundamental skill to programming in general.
I favor introducing "objects" and "classes" early, but not immediately.