CHAPTER 1                      What is Object Oriented Programming? 1

CHAPTER 2                       To OOP or Not to OOP? 5

CHAPTER 3                       What is a Class? 9

Defining a Class 10

Defining a Class 11

The INIT method 14

First New Thing 14

Second New Thing 15

Third New Thing (IDL 7.1 and before) 17

Third New Thing (IDL 8.0+) 17

CHAPTER 4                       Data Hiding or Encapsulation 21

CHAPTER 5                       Inheritance - When being related is a good thing 33

Inheritance types 34

Simple Inheritance 34

Level Inheritance 34

Multiple Inheritance 36

Protected Methods 39

CHAPTER 6                Polymorphism and Method Overriding 41

CHAPTER 7                       Abstraction 47

CHAPTER 8                       How Do I Decide? 55

CHAPTER 9                       Working Together 59

CHAPTER 10                       IDL OOP Tricks 71

Breaking the Encapsulation Rule 71

Replacing the self structure with another object 72

Garbage Collection 74

Saving and Restoring Objects 75

Copying objects 83

Snapshots 85

Determining if an object has a certain method 86

Static Members (sort of) 87

CHAPTER 11                       To IDL 8.0 and beyond! 91

Garbage Collection 91

Turning off garbage collection 93

New operator syntax 94

New Object Creation 97

Operator Overloading 97

Appendix                       Private, Protected & Abstract 115

Private Method. 115

Protected Method 116

Abstract Class 117

Abstract Methods 117