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.

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.

From object technology pioneer, Design by Contract inventor and ETH Zurich professor Bertrand Meyer, winner of ACM Software System Award, the Dahl-Nygaard prize and the Jolt award, Touch of Class is a revolutionary introductory programming textbook that makes learning programming fun and rewarding. Instead of the traditional low-level examples, 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 explore "from the outside in" as they learn new programming techniques. Unique to Touch of Class is the combination of a practical, hands-on approach with sound theory. Throughout the presentation of software concepts, the book relies on the principles of Design by Contract, critical to software quality and providing a gentle introduction to formal methods. The coverage is notable in both its depth and itsbreadth. In addition to core programming concepts such as control structures, algorithms and fundamental data structures, it encompasses recursion (including theory and implementation), reference and pointer manipulation, inheritance and associated techniques of polymorphism and dynamic binding, topological sort as an example of algorithm and API design, syntax description techniques, important design patterns such as Observer and Visitor, event-driven programming, high-level function closures (including an introduction to lambda calculus) and software tools. The final chapter is a detailed introduction to the challenges and techniques of software engineering, from lifecycle models to requirements analysis. The use of full color brings exciting programming concepts to life. Touch of Class gives students the leading edge by teaching both the fundamental techniques of programming and the professional-level skills preparing them for the challenges of modern software engineering.

From the reviews:“This book ‘is not just about learning to program but about ’Learning to program Well.’’ Meyer’s latest text conveys his impressive experience in the field of computer science, going well beyond just software engineering. … the target audience includes both students and teachers. …The large quantity of information provided is well organized. … Colors are plentiful and character fonts play an important role. …Coming from a father of object orientation and software quality, it is not surprising that this is an excellent book.” (Alexandre Bergel, ACM Computing Reviews, January, 2010)“The best thing about this book, and it is a very good thing indeed, is that it is thorough. … The material is well-written and thorough – it includes introductory material aimed at the student, then at the instructor. … this is an excellent book. If I were put in the position of needing to teach an elementary programming course … this would be high on my list of candidate textbooks.” (Robert L. Glass, The Software Practitioner, January-February, 2010)“This nicely written and enjoyable textbook is used for the ‘Introduction to programming’ course taught at ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) to all entering computing science students. … In addition to the excellent book, Meyer provides an outstanding web site (http://touch.ethz.ch/) with a huge amount of material including course slides, video recording of lectures, slides for exercise sessions, a lot of information for instructors, software downloads, and, of course, blogs and wikis.” (Haim Kilov, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1188, 2010)"Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well with Objects and Contracts" (ToC) is an excellent book to read. (…) Instead of teaching a whole lot of details from the bottom up, it explains from the top, giving the whole picture, why things are done and then down to the details of how they are done. Meyer also calls this outside-in. You can see the whole at once and then explain the details. This is how programming should be — using broad concepts, rather than narrow implementation details. ( Ian Joyner on https://siliconvalleyhype.quora.com/, Jan 2022).

Revolutionary introduction to programming First introductory programming book to use concepts of Design by Contract for software safety and reliability Examples and exercises allow all students to build graphical and multimedia applications right from the start Includes introductions into Java, C#, and C++ of 30 pages each to enable easy application of presented concepts in various object-oriented languages Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras