The CRC Card Book

Rating:
Summary: Great book for helping do high level OO design.
Review: I have been trying to teach OOD to new graduates for a couple of years. Now I teach through this book first. It has more good information about how to get groups to come up with good designs than any other book I have found. Be warned, it's not about UML or Java. The book is about how to get people to work out a design together.

Rating:
Summary: Informal down to earth technique for everybody
Review: This book and the stream of thought it stems from is one of the most influental in OO software engineering. It focuses on sharing responsibility in a system. It takes into account the obvious parallels between software teams and their software systems.
The technique itself can be very enjoyable and if you can convince very formal people to use it, it will change their lives, much more then any formal OO methodology will do. CRC Cards make you live software systems! This should be the first experience of everybody who wants to learn OO. You can even use it to explain your work to your kids:-)

Rating:
Summary: High-effective but fragile
Review: This book encourages better OO design and analysis, shows how to involve the entire team of developers to the design of the whole system. The authors also describe how to gain benefit from involving the user and other parties to the OO design process.

I was in OO development for five years and I was thinking about a solution which will improve the efficiency of OO design and help to avoid splitting the program between developers who create their own set of classes they are responsible for. Such splitting leads to integration problems and overall design imbalance. Fred Brooks has described this consequences in his famous book "The Mythical Man-Month", where the modules are being written first and integrated later, and the coordination of interfaces between modules written by each developer requires essential effort and time. The CRC Card Book shows how to have "the interfaces" coordinated in the very beginning.

However, the methodology described in this book is "fragile". As soon as it isn't followed by all of the developers, it became useless. But if it is followed, the results are amazing. The book, however, is not very easy to read and lack something which can attract the developers who are "neutral" to improving their way of creating OO programs. But, for the people who already have strong OO background and are seeking the way how to improve their efficiency significant, the book is a must-have.

Rating:
Summary: Ideal for getting you started on "how to" identify Classes.
Review: You want to know a great way on "how to" identify classes from any type of user requiremnets? Buy this book now!

A lot of OOA books like to tell how to design from start to finish. However, some (most) of us are thrown in some obligatory process without consent. CRC will bridge the gap on getting your Classes defined.

Also, CRC works well for "Use Cases". I use CRC after a good Use Case session for Class Diagrams. Some prefer to do CRC before Use Cases. That's the beauty, CRC can be injected anywhere you deem fit.

And, finally, this book will get you "thinking in objects" fast!

Rating:
Summary: Ideal for getting you started on "how to" identify Classes.
Review: You want to know a great way on "how to" identify classes from any type of user requiremnets? Buy this book now!

A lot of OOA books like to tell how to design from start to finish. However, some (most) of us are thrown in some obligatory process without consent. CRC will bridge the gap on getting your Classes defined.

Also, CRC works well for "Use Cases". I use CRC after a good Use Case session for Class Diagrams. Some prefer to do CRC before Use Cases. That's the beauty, CRC can be injected anywhere you deem fit.

And, finally, this book will get you "thinking in objects" fast!