How do i get out of the habit of procedural progra

Question

I'm hoping to get some tips to kinda help me break out of what i consider after all these years a bad habit of procedural programming. Every time i attempt to do a project in OOP i end up eventually reverting to procedural. I guess i'm not completely convinced with OOP (even though i think i've heard everything good about it!).

So i guess any good practical examples of common programming tasks that i often carry out such as user authentication/management, data parsing, CMS/Blogging/eComs are the kinda of things i do often, yet i haven't been able to get my head around how to do them in OOP and away from procedural, especially as the systems i build tend to work and work well.

One thing i can see as a downfall to my development, is that i do reuse my code often, and it often needs more rewrites and improvement, but i sometimes consider this as a natural evolution of my software development.

Yet i want to change! to my fellow programmers, help :) any tips on how i can break out of this nasty habbit?

Answer 1

Step 1. Read a good Design Patterns book. http://www.oodesign.com/

Step 2. Pick something you already know and rework it from an OO perspective. This is the Code Dojo approach. Take a problem that you already understand, and define the object classes.

I did this -- and wrote down what I did.

See http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/oodesign.html#book-oodesign

You can do the same series of exercises to get the hang of OO design and code.

Answer 2

A great step would be to start of with a OOP framework, you can still write procedural code in the framework but over time you can refine your coding habits & start converting functionality into objects.

Also reading about patterns & data modeling will give you more ideas about to code your logic in a OOP style.