Object-Oriented Programming in Computer Science

Introduction

In computer science, a program is composed of a series of commands, which runs within a computer or an electronic circuit, producing information for users. Programming is a that can help programmers while writing a program. Computer programming is the process of writing an algorithm and, it is also the encoding of the algorithm into a notation that can produce and provide information to the users. It can be classified into two groups, that is, system programming and application programming. System programming is a sub branch of the general programming that is composed of low level instructions which are used to operate and handle computer hardware. Application programming is considered as the improved version of the computer programs which can perform specific tasks for the users. One of the application programming types is the object oriented programming (OOP) which is about how information is represented in human mind.

As a computer programming approach, OOP is useful such that it provides easy modeling in designing and developing real entities. This approach is intended to model the entities and, also, the relationships existing between them. OOP allows programmers to define the required classes to create the objects and to apply modifications (manipulations) on them. It can also supply inheritance, polymorphism and encapsulation features to the developers. With these capabilities, the processed data can be isolated from other redundant applications. Because of its abilities that are readily available to the users, OOP is preferred much more than other available programming languages. The inherent properties of OOP, which do not exist in other application programming, can be stated as modularity, extensibility and reusability. This chapter provides a substantial survey of OOP in computer science.

In this chapter, we have highlighted a number of explanations and reviews that are generally accepted and are in common use in OOP. We explain the heart of this chapter OOP concept in section 1, Object Oriented Programming Features, making up the largest section. Main topic of OOP which are included Inheritance, Polymorphism, Abstraction and Encapsulation titles are explained with details in the subtitles of section 1. In section 2, you can find an example of OOP implementation in Java. There are many kinds of OOP languages in use but in this study, Java was given as a strong example to OOP language (Harel, Marron, & Weiss, 2010). The following section is Future Research Directions which include future works related OOP. The chapter ends with Conclusion section that gives a brief information about this study.