Touch of Class Learning to Program Well with Objects and Contracts

From object technology pioneer and ETH Zurich professor Bertrand Meyer, winner of the Jolt award and the ACM Software System Award, a revolutionary textbook that makes learning programming fun and rewarding. Meyer builds his presentation on a rich object-oriented software system supporting graphics and multimedia, which students can use to produce impressive applications from day one, then understand inside out as they learn new programming techniques.

Unique to Touch of Class is a combination of a practical, hands-on approach to programming with the introduction of sound theoretical support focused on helping students learn the construction of high quality software. The use of full color brings exciting programming concepts to life.

Among the useful features of the book is the use of Design by Contract, critical to software quality and providing a gentle introduction to formal methods.

Will give students a major advantage by teaching professional-level techniques in a literate, relaxed and humorous way.

Basics.- The industry of pure ideas.- Dealing with objects.- Program structure basics.- The interface of a class.- Just Enough Logic.- Creating objects and executing systems.- Control structures.- Routines, functional abstraction and information hiding.- Variables, assignment and references.- How things work.- Just enough hardware.- Describing syntax.- Programming languages and tools.- Algorithms and data structures.- Fundamental data structures, genericity, and algorithm complexity.- Recursion and trees.- Devising and engineering an algorithm: Topological Sort.- Object-Oriented Techniques.- Inheritance.- Operations as objects: agents and lambda calculus.- Event-driven design.- Towards software engineering.- to software engineering.

Founder and chief technology officer, Eiffel Software (Santa Barbara)
Professor of Software Engineering, ETH Zurich, since 2001. Department head (2004-2006).
ACM Software System Award, 2007
Dahl-Nygaard Object Technology Award, 2006
Doctor Honoris Causæ, State Technical University of Saint Petersburg (ITMO), 2006
Member of the French Academy of Technology
Publisher of the Journal of Object Technology
President, Informatics Europe (association of European computer science departments)
Formerly: visiting associate professor at Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; professor (adjunct) at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia)