SAMS Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours THIRD EDITION

Hour 18. Object Primer

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• What Object Oriented Programming is all about

• The basics of constructing a class and methods

• How to design a class in Perl

In the late 1980s a trend started towards object-oriented programming (sometimes abbreviated as OOP). In this type of programming, instead of viewing a programming task as just variables, functions, and sequential program flow, the view was changed to classes, methods, and properties. The concepts of polymorphism, inheritance, and encapsulation became built into languages such as Smalltalk, C++, and later Java.

Thousands of books and research papers have been written on object-oriented programming. At one point, it was thought to be the mythical “silver bullet” of programming ...