Hour 10. Creating Your First Object

One of the more fearsome examples of jargon that you'll encounter during these 24 hours is object-oriented programming. This is a complicated term that describes, in an elegant way, what a computer program is and how it works. Before object-oriented programming, a computer program was usually described under the simplest definition you've learned in this tutorial: a set of instructions listed in a file and handled in some kind of reliable order. Whether the program is big or small, the programmer's job is largely the same—write instructions for each thing the computer must do. By thinking of a program as a collection of objects instead, you can figure out the tasks a program must accomplish, then assign the tasks to the objects where they best belong. During this hour, the following topics will be covered:

• Understanding objects
• Describing an object with attributes
• Determining how objects behave
• Combining objects
• Inheriting from other objects
• Creating an object
• Converting objects and other types of information