INTRODUCTION TO OBJECT-ORIENTED TERMINOLOGY

You must understand a few object-oriented concepts to be successful at reading and working
with C++ programs in this book. Note, however, that you will not learn enough to make you a
C++ programmer. You will have to take additional courses in C++ to become a C++ programmer.

To fully understand the term “object-oriented,” you need to know a little about procedural
programming. Procedural programming is a style of programming that is older than objectoriented
programming. Procedural programs consist of statements that the computer runs or
executes. Many of the statements make calls (a request to run or execute) to groups of other
statements that are known as procedures, modules, methods, or subroutines. Therefore, these
programs are known as “procedural” because they perform a sequence of procedures.
Procedural programming focuses on writing code that takes some data (for example, some
sales figures), performs a specific task using the data (for example, adding up the sales
figures), and then produces output (for example, a sales report). When people who use procedural
programs (the users) decide that they want their programs to do something slightly
different, a programmer revises the program code, taking great care not to introduce errors
into the logic of the program.