My biggest complaint about programming education and text-books is the handling of the 'object-oriented' issue. They throw it at you, at the very start, with ze

My biggest complaint about programming education and text-books is the handling of the 'object-oriented' issue. They throw it at you, at the very start, with zero context. I asked my lecturer what 'non-object-oriented' programming would be, and he couldn't give me a straight answer. A fellow student turned and said 'it's like when you don't have buttons, just prompts' (with an implied 'd'uh!'). It seemed he was confusing the OO paradigm with the 'visual' programming/design paradigm. Another problem is when they teach about encapsulation, they put far too much emphasis on defensive programming and make it sound like there's hackers out to meddle with your classes or grossly negligent colleagues who MUST NEVER see your code; whereas it seems to me the main benefit is 'information hiding' for the purpose of focusing control/interfacing into single points thereby making changes easier (eg. you could have any number of possible mechanisms behind a clock-face but the face remains always familiar to the outside world). Of course, these are just my opinions as a relative n00b. :)