Touch of Class

From the reviews:

“This book ‘is not just about learning to program but about ’Learning to program Well.’’ Meyer’s latest text conveys his impressive experience in the field of computer science, going well beyond just software engineering. … the target audience includes both students and teachers. …The large quantity of information provided is well organized. … Colors are plentiful and character fonts play an important role. …Coming from a father of object orientation and software quality, it is not surprising that this is an excellent book.” (Alexandre Bergel, ACM Computing Reviews, January, 2010)

“The best thing about this book, and it is a very good thing indeed, is that it is thorough. … The material is well-written and thorough – it includes introductory material aimed at the student, then at the instructor. … this is an excellent book. If I were put in the position of needing to teach an elementary programming course … this would be high on my list of candidate textbooks.” (Robert L. Glass, The Software Practitioner, January-February, 2010)

“This nicely written and enjoyable textbook is used for the ‘Introduction to programming’ course taught at ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) to all entering computing science students. … In addition to the excellent book, Meyer provides an outstanding web site (http://touch.ethz.ch/) with a huge amount of material including course slides, video recording of lectures, slides for exercise sessions, a lot of information for instructors, software downloads, and, of course, blogs and wikis.” (Haim Kilov, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1188, 2010)

"Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well with Objects and Contracts" (ToC) is an excellent book to read. (…) Instead of teaching a whole lot of details from the bottom up, it explains from the top, giving the whole picture, why things are done and then down to the details of how they are done. Meyer also calls this outside-in. You can see the whole at once and then explain the details. This is how programming should be — using broad concepts, rather than narrow implementation details. ( Ian Joyner on https://siliconvalleyhype.quora.com/, Jan 2022).