Short Course

Object-Oriented Programming
and the
NeXTSTEP Development Environment

John R. Glover
University of Houston
August 1992


These are notes used in a 3-day short course taught occasionally at the University of Houston.  Included here is the schedule used in teaching the course, the notes themselves, the lab exercises, and several additional example programs.  The notes here are updates to the August 1991 edition.  I have updated everything to NeXTSTEP 3.0, added to and improved many parts, and corrected known errors.

The notes are sized for landscape presentation on the screen with a video projector.  They are most easily used as follows:

Call up the desired chapter in WriteNow.
Set the magnification of the window to 125% and resize the window to fill the screen.
Click on the page forward/backward buttons to move through the notes.
You can modify selected pages in each chapter to give "progressive disclosure" of the several points on each page.

For hardcopy of the notes, you can either print out the notes as they are so that each class participant has a full-size page of what is on the screen, or you can print the pages in 4 Up (Page/Page Layout... ) to reduce the printing volume.  In either case, I suggest you provide a three-ring binder of the notes to each participant.

The Labs folder contains laboratory exercises 2-9, as listed in the Schedule.  To prepare the labs for use, you must first go to the project directories within the Solution and Extension directories of each lab and type "make."  Or, have each student do so after copying the lab to his/her own folder.  (I removed the object and executable files to make this package smaller.)

The Examples folder contains some programming examples I have collected.  A couple are referred to in the notes and labs.  To run these you must also go to each one and type "make."

There is a file in the Labs folder named Labs.README which gives instructions on how each student should set up to use the labs.

These notes were developed and adapted from many sources, including my old NeXT Developer Camp notes and several other sources I cannot even remember.  For that reason I am making them public.  They are being made public under guidelines similar to that of gnu software.  That is,  I ask that you make these notes, or any notes derived from these notes,  freely available to others, giving appropriate credit to the original source(s).

If anyone sends me corrections or suggested changes, I will incorporate them and update these notes in the future, again making them available to all.  If anyone wishes to add their own notes on OOP, NeXTSTEP, IB, etc., I will be happy to merge them in some fashion that makes sense and make the combined notes available to all.

John R. Glover
Electrical Engineering Department
University of Houston
Houston, Texas  77204-4793
glover@uh.edu