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Here is a brief list of important authors on the concepts of the so-called Object Technologies. It is very personal, and is not intended to be complete or to list the most important authors of this field.
I've just listed here authors that were important to start my interest in Object Technologies. The idea is: they started my interest, so maybe they will start yours.
They're very dissimilar in attitudes and approaches, but they all share a pragmatic vision --- they're interested in arriving at a product --, and a passionate interest in their theme: they're not afraid of polemics. Maybe their passion is what stimulates me as a reader of their work.
His most important book is Object-Oriented
Software Construction, a fundamental book. A second
edition of it has been recently released.
C Chest, Holub's column was so influent world-wide that it would not be an extreme exaggeration to state that most old C programmers that didn't come from the Unix world have learned their C from it.
Possibly due to his academic links , Holub never forgets the concepts behind most programming techniques. Of course, being also an industry man, he's always interested in the practical aspects of things. So his tips actually work. Maybe another consequence of Holub's links to academy is his criticality. Differently from other equally proficient programmers that receive media coverage, he's not afraid of criticizing tools by Microsoft and by other big shot tool makers, while acknowledging their qualities.
After his start as a C programmer, Holub migrated to C++, like everyone else. He documented his C++ apprenticeship in a very interesting book, C + C++: Programming with Objects in C and C++. This book highlights an attempt to do OOP in C, that is lead to its limits, showing that real world OOP can be done much more easily in an OOP language, and that leads to C++ programming. That approach has the interesting side effect of showing how things are done under the covers in C++: how constructors are called etc. In that sense, this book precedes Lippman's Inside the C++ Object Model , but possibly without the same specialization and a little less up to date.
Holub has worked also with the OO expression of the Win32 GUI elements. The Win32 API is unanimously acknowledged as a very complex piece of software, so the idea would be to use object-oriented techniques to organize, to structure and to simplify Win32 programming. Microsoft, Borland and lots of others have tried to do this. About Microsoft attempt, called MFC, or "Microsoft Foundation Classes", Holub said that their authors are very good OO programers, but bad OO designers. So, in a series of papers published in Microsoft Systems Journal, Holub presented a better OO design for doing Win32 GUI, and also a way to do persistent storage, an OO jargon for the automatic storage and retrieval of objects that knows about the classes of the objects stored.
Also like every C++ programmer and his sister, Holub became interested in Java. His most recent works are the documented creation of a Java Virtual Machine and several courses on Java.
Allen Holub information at Holub
& Associates.
If software engineering was engineering in the usual sense, Martin would have the right engineering approach: he tries to find useful techniques and concepts in authors of several different schools. For instance, he's basically a C++ type, he's not afraid of quoting the French author Bertrand Meyer, the creator of Eiffel. That's even more surprising when you remember that Robert Martin is a heavy user of Booch methods, as documented in his book Designing Object-Oriented C++ Applications using the Booch method. It would be even more remarkable if Martin was American, as American programmers tend to prefer American authors.
So, let me tell you: he's American.
Martin's approach to software engineering isn't also limited to OO authors: he's also a reader of Barbara Liskov, the creator of the modular programming language CLU and an author writing on modular programming.
Possibly the reasons for Martin's open mind for different authors lie in his programming background: he begun his OO development career as a Smalltalk programmer. Maybe that proximity with Smalltalk, one of the purest OO languages available to the masses.
Maybe that proximity to Smalltalk purity can also explain why Martin's proposal are so coherent, in spite of the different authors he adopts. Martin's books and many papers can be read as one of the most complete and critical introductions largely available. Most Martin's papers are available for free download at his site in Object Mentor Publications.
Robert Martin is mostly a C++ instructor and mentor, so most of his works are presentation of someone else's work. Maybe with time the originality of his fusion of the work of other authors can grow into an original work.
Here is the reference of Martin's book:
The design of several applications is presented in detail: from a cross-reference tool to a security management system for buildings. The approach used is to introduce theoretical concepts as they are needed to solve some practical problems. That's certainly a very good way to present ideas that otherwise would be too abstract.
You can read more about the above book --- and even buy it --- in Amazon.com.
Robert Martin's Object Mentor
Associates.
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