Edit: I received a lot of feedback that this post is a rant. It's probably true. The primary reason is because of frustration. I have been engaging online looking for books and example of code presenting “Good OOP” for studying and refining my views. The previous book I was recommended and read: Growing Object Oriented Software, was a blast. This book was recommended frequently, even more than the previous one, so I reluctantly bought it and then got rather upset about how big of a disappointment it was. It's a book about small scope code refactoring, not really OOP, so it's not even on the point. And even at learning to refactor, I think it uses confusing and counterproductive examples all the way. I read it, I didn't like it, I wrote a short rant why exactly, to get it off my list. If you don't enjoy rants, hit Ctrl+W now.

When asking around “Good OOP” examples a lot of people recommend 99 bottles of OOP book. I was reluctant to buy it. By the name and the description, I could tell that it is going to use the “99 Bottles of Beer” song as an example of some sort... which frankly seemed completely unproductive. But since people keep on mentioning it – I got it. And unsurprisingly, I was right: the book indeed is confusing and just... not good.

TL;DR: Even as a vocal critic of OOP, I can see that this book is doing a huge disservice to anything that could be called a reasonable OOP. Save yourself $40 and don't buy it. If you own it, throw it in the trash. If you've read it – know that you learned a bunch of nonsense about OOP, and maybe some minor stuff about structuring your code and writing tests.

TL;DR: I review Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests and contrast it with my personal approach to developing software, explaining my reasoning, and making some comments on the book, OOP and software engineering in general.

As some people might now I am a vocal OOP critic. I think it is fair to say that I am on a crusade, actually. :D

Oftentimes, my long online posts explaining what is wrong with OOP meet with a No true Scotsman argument. That I am somehow pointing out to flaws in caricature of an OOP, and the correct OOP is free from these issues. To prove to myself and other people that it is not the case, I decided to go through some classic OOP books, and criticize the OOP examples in them.

My first choice is the Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob). I must admit Uncle Bob is not one of my favorite software engineering gurus. But he is a reputable and experience developer, and if he was to write a caricature of OOP, then who are the people who dare to say they do it right?