The developer of the acclaimed Eiffel programming language comes through with one of the clearest and most informative books about computers ever committed to paper. Object-Oriented Software Construction is the gospel of object-oriented technology and it deserves to be spread everywhere. Meyer opens with coverage of the need for an object-oriented approach to software development, citing improved quality and development speed as key advantages of the approach. He then explains all the key criteria that define an object- oriented approach to a problem. Meyer pays attention to techniques, such as classes, objects, memory management, and more, returning to each technique and polishing his readers' knowledge of it as he explains how to employ it "well." In a section on advanced topics, Meyer explores interesting and relevant topics, such as persistent objects stored in a database. He also offers a sort of "Do and Don't" section in which he enumerates common mistakes and ways to avoid them. Management information isn't the main point of Object-Oriented Software Construction, but you'll find some in its pages. Meyer concludes his tour de force with comparisons of all the key object-oriented languages, including Java. He also covers the potential of simulating object technology in non-object-oriented languages, such as Pascal and Fortran. The companion CD-ROM includes the full text of this book in hypertext form, as well as some tools for designing object-oriented systems. If you program computers, you need to read this book.

Though there are some minor drawbacks in this book :
-the book can be reduced to half of its size without sacrifying rigour and clearity. Some topics are not needed.
-design patterns are missing in this book.
-does not explain enough about unit testing. While the book gives very good explanation on design by contract, design by contract should be seen as an addition to unit testing, but it cannot replace it !!!

Finally some remarks : please do not overestimate the power of software reuse : in reality it has limited usage since in order to create reusable software and reuse it, each teammember has to know quite well what the other teams are doing in order to reuse some part of their work. In reality, for big projects, this is often impractical.
-Design by contract is an important software technique, but you can also use it (apart from some limitations) in Java the assert statement. Of course eiffel is probabaly the best designed programming language. But that does not make it the best choice for building complex applications!! I am convinced that Java , in combination with the techniques describbed in this book, with unit testing frameworks like Junit, with aspect oriented programming facilities, and with usage of design patterns can beat eiffel as a development environment for building mission critical applications.

The feature I find most special is the pull down menu style outline quality of these pages. Abandon your highlighters with this book. Meyer has already digested and illuminated the key concepts for you. Fortunately, this does nothing to diminish the surrounding text.

High marks for editing quality and concept density in a book which clearly pays for itself a third of the way through.