Touch of Class

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.

Founder and chief technology officer, Eiffel Software (Santa Barbara)
Professor of Software Engineering, ETH Zurich, since 2001. Department head (2004-2006).
ACM Software System Award, 2007
Dahl-Nygaard Object Technology Award, 2006
Doctor Honoris Causæ, State Technical University of Saint Petersburg (ITMO), 2006
Member of the French Academy of Technology
Publisher of the Journal of Object Technology
President, Informatics Europe (association of European computer science departments)
Formerly: visiting associate professor at Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; professor (adjunct) at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia)

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