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copied!<p>I have a three step process, this is one that I have gone through successfully myself. Later I met an ex-teacher turned programmer (now very experienced) who explained to me exactly why this method worked so well, there's some psychology involved but it's essentially all about maintaining control and confidence as you learn. Here it is:</p> <ol> <li><p>Learn what test driven development (TDD) is. You can comfortably do this with procedural code so you don't need to start working with objects yet if you don't want to. The second step depends on this.</p></li> <li><p>Pick up a copy of Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler. It's essentially a catalogue of little changes that you can make to existing code. You can't refactor properly without tests though. What this allows you to do is to mess with the code without worrying that everything will break. Tests and refactoring take away the paranoia and sense that you don't know what will happen, which is incredibly liberating. You left to basically play around. As you get more confident with that start exploring mocks for testing the interactions between objects.</p></li> <li><p>Now comes the big that most people, mistakenly start with, it's good stuff but it should really come third. At this point you can should reading about design patterns, code smells (that's a good one to Google) and object oriented design principles. Also learn about user stories or use cases as these give you good initial candidate classes when writing new applications, which is a good solution to the "where do I start?" problem when writing apps.</p></li> </ol> <p>And that's it! Proven goodness! Let me know how it goes.</p>

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