As a regular visitor on this board for almost a decade even before I register as a member years later, I have always seen the thread “I want to learn programming, which language should I start with” which is sticky BTW but I never bothered to open it. Yester-night out of curiosity, I decided to skim through the first 20 pages of the thread. Javanian made an excellent intro specifying the various programming platforms and the language suited for each platform as well as the tasks they excel in, and as is common on topics of such nature, it degenerated into language fights and supremacy. Yes, majority of programmers are emotionally attached to their language of choice, no matter its flaws and frailties. But languages keep evolving, adding and removing features as the case may be else it tows the path of BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN or even the mighty PERL.

But I noticed a disturbing and reoccurring misconception about OOP from the comments of some professionals and guides. Since a lot of people started programming from OO concept, they don’t really understand the major differences between Objected-oriented programming (aka Classical) and structured programming (famous as procedural). If you’ve ever done procedural (structured) programming with C or PHP, you’ll appreciate and understand the sanity and flexibility OOP brings to programs; though some developers are still stuck with procedural style of programming, claiming that no language is completely OO without vestiges of procedural design.

Late 2009 when I dived head-long into programming, the first book I read was language-agnostic titled “Object-Oriented Thought Process” by Matt Weisfeld though C (procedural) was the first language I learnt some months later. The author took time to explain the OO concept without leaning to any language model. Using examples from C#, JAVA and VB.NET, he explained Encapsulation, Inheritance and Polymorphism as the core concept of OOP. He dissected the differences between procedural (structured) and OO design/analysis, and why programs should be designed and built using OO concepts.

I highly recommend this book to people who intend to learn OR are learning any modern OOP language like C#, JAVA, RUBY, PYTHON, PHP and even JAVASCRIPT (though this is not a classical language but prototypal which is object-based). You will gain a deeper understanding of OOP concepts and program design/analysis.

NOTE: since C++ is a superset of C, it consists of both structured and OOP concepts/features