For me OO was a roadblock for years thanks to really bad early chapters in introductory Java and C++ books that made it sound magical and used awful "sally tell

For me OO was a roadblock for years thanks to really bad early chapters in introductory Java and C++ books that made it sound magical and used awful "sally tells tommy that she wants to buy some flowers"-type examples. From those I figured it was something really complicated (nope) and advanced (unh-uh) so I didn't seek help when I needed it (if I can't learn it from the intro book I must not be able to, right? Hahaha). It probably didn't help that Perl was my first language. With a solid grounding in C I might have made the "this is just a struct with functions and some sugar on top? Why the hell didn't they say so!?" leap much sooner—as it is, I eventually made that leap from associative arrays instead of the closer analog of structs—again, I learned on Perl. Someone to say, "look, you pretty much already know this, it's..." would have saved me tons of time and accelerated my learning substantially. I hope for the sake of people learning now that all these online tutorials and interactive exercises have made that sort of thing largely a thing of the past. [EDIT] grammar