programming and how to technically implement a number of different techniques that are

used within Drupal and also used across the board on many object-oriented based projects.

So at its core, object-oriented programming will give you a better model of how to organize

your code. Now, a lot of PHP programmers started by simply hacking away and trying to get something

that's functional and what you end up with is something called procedural code. You have

variables and you have functions, and the role of the functions is to get from point

A to point B. It's to complete some kind of task.

So for example, we might convert data from one format to another or we might take some

data in an array and organize it according to its alphabetical order. And the idea is

that you're constructing your code so that you step through these different procedures.

Now, after you have some programming experience, you start to realize that a lot of these functions

can be generalized so you can use them in various other situations. So for example,

if you have that function that sorts items in an array alphabetically, you might find

that useful to convert other types of data into an alphabetically ordered list. For example,

some XML Or a set of strings.

And as you start to think this way, your mind is actually going more towards object-oriented

programming. You're thinking about these functions as these little machines that can be used

in different situations, not just the original situation that they were intended for.

When you start to dive into tutorials about object-oriented programming, you'll find that

people use real world objects as examples because, in a big way, the world is very object-oriented.

The idea is that as you look around you, you see yourself surrounded by these different

objects, and objects are basically anything that you can give a noun to.

So for example, right now I'm surrounded by my computer, a glass of water, and a lamp.

Because we can name each one of these things, they are really objects. And in the real world,

objects aren't limited in the way that they can interact with one another. So for example,

I can use the lamp to illuminate the keyboard on my computer. I can use it to see through

the glass of water that I have. I can take the glass of water and dump it on the computer.

And really, it keeps going but the idea is that the interaction between the objects in

our world are limited more by our imagination rather than any limitation in the object itself.

Now, if you apply that idea to your code, then what you should end up with are these

components that can be used in ways that were unanticipated at the start because you have

modeled the behavior of that item and contained it in an object. And it turns out that this

is actually a pretty natural way for code to be organized.

Now, the tricky part at first is taking that idea and seeing how it relates to code. Because

most of the time when we're dealing with code, we're dealing with kind of abstract concepts,

we're dealing with things that don't have a parallel in the physical world.

For example, on a website, we have images, we have forms, we have blocks of content across

the page, and templates. We can call each of these things by their name which is a noun

and that indicates, at least on some level, that they're objects. In addition, there are

objects that have more abstract ideas associated with them. For example, a calculator that

performs some operation on the data that gets sent to it or, in the example of our function

that sorts alphabetically, we have a sorter.

Those little bits of code are like machines and they're our inventions and we can give

them whatever name we want, but they are objects that didn't really exist before we created

them. Now, if you don't immediately see the application of this different way of looking

at your code, that is, looking at it as objects rather than a set of procedures, that's okay.

That sort of perspective comes from actually working with it and seeing how the code is

organized and what kind of benefits arise from organizing it in that different way.

So just let some of those ideas start to percolate and we're going to start getting our hands

dirty. And along the way, we'll talk about the implications of thinking of your code

along these lines.