Introduction to Programming: Additional work for week 18

• I. Warren, University of Bradford
• Dave Jarvis, JOOT Inc.
• Tim Margush, Nova Southeastern University

Information hiding is one of the most fundamental principles of good computer programming. The idea was first clearly explained by David Parnas in his influential paper "On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems Into Modules", in the journal Communications of the ACM, volume 15, number 12, (December 1972) pages 1053-1058. You can find a hard copy of this in the library, but for copyright reasons it's not available on the web.

Here are some general articles on information hiding which are available on the web:

• Bertrand Meyer in Software Development Online
• Steve McConnell in IEEE Software
• Rose Mazhindu-Shumba, University of Zimbabwe

We looked at the class Object which is a superclass of all classes. Here are some notes on this:

• Jonathan Campbell, Queen's University, Belfast
• javaprepare.com
• Bill Venners in JavaWorld.

We also looked at the primitive wrapper classes. Here are some notes on them:

• Alan B. Downey (from his book "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist").
• C.Jones, University of Alberta
• Rodney Topor, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
• Chuck Allison of Fresh Sources Inc.