"The Oberon System, User Guide and Programmer's Manual"
Martin Reiser
Addison-Wesley, Wokingham England, 1991, ISBN 0-201-54422-9
This is a user guide, tutorial, and reference manual for the original ETH Oberon system. This book is relevant for someone who is using one of the implementations of the original ETH Oberon.
"Programming in Oberon, Steps beyond Pascal and Modula"
Martin Reiser, Niklaus Wirth
Addison-Wesley, Wokingham England, 1992, ISBN 0-201-56543-9
This book introduces the language Oberon. Examples, exercises, and basic formal techniques are used to explain the various language constructs. One chapter is devoted to the Oberon-2 extensions of the language. An appendix contains the complete Oberon language report. This book is a must for everyone interested in the Oberon language.
"Project Oberon, The Design of an Operating System and Compiler"
Niklaus Wirth, Juerg Gutknecht
Addison-Wesley, Wokingham England, 1992, ISBN 0-201-54428-8
This is a text book on the ETH Oberon system and compiler for the Ceres workstation. It explains the basic concepts underlying the original ETH Oberon system. Particularly interesting is that almost the complete commented source code of the system is given in the book, including the sources for the compiler.
This book is interesting for students of computer science, since it constitutes a case study of a modern software system of very broad scope, and unencumbered by issues dealing with compatibility to legacy systems.
"Insight ETHOS: On Object-Orientation in Operating Systems"
Clemens Szyperski
vdf, Zuerich, 1992, ISBN 3 7281 1948 2
This PhD thesis discusses various aspects of OOP in operating systems, with emphasis on dynamic extensibility and type-safety. Furthermore, the experimental operating system Ethos is described, which had been developed as a demonstration of the concepts developed for the thesis.
Ethos evolved out of the original Oberon system of ETH. It went further than that in mainly three areas: it provided extensibility at every level, instead of providing it in only a few critical spots like the window system. Secondly, it defined and followed some general design principles in order to make "design for extensibility" a more systematic process. Thirdly, it used the static expressiveness of the language Oberon-2 (i.e. modules, types, type-bound procedures, read-only export) to make design decisions explicit (and thus documented and checkable by the compiler) wherever possible. Ethos showed that strong typing and strong modularity are not only not preventing extensibility, but that they are on the contrary very powerful tools to make the development of efficient, robust, and maintainable extensible systems more manageable.
The author is a founder of Oberon microsystems and co-designer of Oberon/F, which is largely based on the results of the Ethos project.
This book is interesting for students of computer science who are interested in the application of OOP to extensible software systems, in particular - but not limited to - operating systems.
"Object-Oriented Programming in Oberon-2"
Hanspeter M
ssenb
Springer Verlag, New York, 1993, ISBN 0-387-56411-X
This book assumes that the reader already knows the language Oberon. It gives an introduction to OOP using Oberon-2 as notation. An extensible window system, with applications like a text editor - which is extensible itself - are used to demonstrate OOP techniques for extensible software systems. The book contains an appendix with the complete Oberon-2 language report.
This book is a good introduction to OOP for someone who knows Pascal or Modula, and now wants to learn the basic OOP techniques.
General literature, ordered chronologically:
"A cookbook for using the Model-View-Controller user interface paradigm in Smalltalk-80"
G. E. Krasner, S. T. Pope
Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, Vol. 1, No. 3, August 1988, pp. 26..49
This article explains the properties and rationales behind the Model-View-Controller separation. Several motivating examples and sketches of their implementation are given. This article is a classic for those interested in the roots of the MVC separation.
"The Unicode Standard"
The Unicode Consortium
Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1990, ISBN 0-201-56788-1
This book (volume 1) introduces the Unicode standard, and gives the character mappings of all characters except the East Asian (Han) ideographic characters, which are described in the second volume.
"Extensible Software Systems"
Dick Pountain, Clemens Szyperski
Byte Magazine, Vol. 19, No. 5, May 1994, pp. 57..62
This article discusses the potential of OOP for the development of extensible software systems, and the obstacles to realizing this potential. The fragile base class problem, and the difficulty of correctly using general inheritance, are explained and put into the context of the discussions between proponents of the SOM and COM object models. The differences between subtyping and subclassing, and between inheritance and delegation are illustrated.
"OLE 2 Programmer's Reference, Volume 1: Working with Windows Objects"
Microsoft Press, Redmont, Washington, 1994, ISBN 1-55615-628-6
This book includes an introduction to the basics of OLE under Windows, addresses the issues of object classs registration as well as details of the OLE 2 User Interface. It also provides a comprehensive reference to OLE interfaces and the OLE API.
OpenDoc
For current literature on OpenDoc, contact Apple (for Macintosh), IBM (for OS/2), or Novell (for Windows); or the Component Integration Labs at Internet address cilabs
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