Readers begin with four complete chapters focusing on objects, classes and methods.
The presentation of primitive data occurs in Chapter 5, ensuring the necessary prior exposure to object declaration, object instantiation, assignment, method calling, parameter passage, class diagrams and object diagrams. The topics of aggregation and inheritance occur earlier than many other CS1 books. In order to accommodate this placement of topics, control structures are covered later than in other books. This book also focuses on the skills and discipline of software engineering that are needed for good programming. Since specifications are critical for conveying code behavior in the object-oriented model, discussions of method preconditions and postconditions, and class invariants are used consistently to document examples and to define example classes.