Chapter 3. Thinking About Programs

In this chapter, you will learn the following:

• Algorithms

• Five programming steps

• Sideways refinement

• UML

• UML class diagrams

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce you to program design. Over the years , many formal program design methodologies have been developed. Some of these design methodologies are relatively complex, whereas others are fairly simple. In all cases, however, the goal was the same: to help the programmer write programs that were easy to write, debug, and maintain.

In this chapter, we'll begin our program design discussion with a very simple design methodology. Although this simple methodology is fairly basic, it serves the purpose of starting you to think about the design of a program. After you've studied this simple methodology, I'll present a more formal methodology called UML. UML is a popular design methodology especially suited for object-oriented programming.