Procedural vs OOP approach in Java - Hands-On Comparison

Procedural vs OOP approach

📖 Scenario: You are creating a simple program to manage information about books in a library. First, you will write the program using a procedural approach. Then, you will rewrite it using an object-oriented approach to see the difference.

🎯 Goal: Build two versions of a program that stores book titles and authors. The first version uses simple variables and arrays (procedural). The second version uses a class to represent each book (OOP). You will see how OOP organizes data and behavior better.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an array of book titles and an array of authors using procedural style

Create a variable to count the number of books

Use a for loop to print each book title with its author in procedural style

Create a Book class with title and author fields

Create an array of Book objects

Use a for loop to print each Book object's title and author

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Managing collections of items like books, movies, or products is common in software. Procedural code works for small tasks, but OOP helps organize complex data better.

💼 Career

Understanding the difference between procedural and object-oriented programming is essential for software development jobs. OOP is widely used in Java and many other languages.

1

Create book data using procedural style

Create a String[] titles array with these exact values: "The Hobbit", "1984", "Pride and Prejudice". Create a String[] authors array with these exact values: "J.R.R. Tolkien", "George Orwell", "Jane Austen".

Java

// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use String[] to create arrays and list the exact book titles and authors inside curly braces.

2

Add a variable to count books

Create an int variable called count and set it to the length of the titles array.

Java

String[] titles = {"The Hobbit", "1984", "Pride and Prejudice"};
String[] authors = {"J.R.R. Tolkien", "George Orwell", "Jane Austen"};
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use titles.length to get the number of books.

3

Print books using procedural style

Use a for loop with int i = 0; i < count; i++ to print each book title and author in the format: Title: [title], Author: [author].

Java

String[] titles = {"The Hobbit", "1984", "Pride and Prejudice"};
String[] authors = {"J.R.R. Tolkien", "George Orwell", "Jane Austen"};
int count = titles.length;
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a for loop to go through each index and print the title and author together.

4

Create Book class and print books using OOP

Create a Book class with String title and String author fields. Create a Book[] books array with three Book objects using the same titles and authors. Use a for loop with int i = 0; i < books.length; i++ to print each book's title and author in the format: Title: [title], Author: [author].

Java

String[] titles = {"The Hobbit", "1984", "Pride and Prejudice"};
String[] authors = {"J.R.R. Tolkien", "George Orwell", "Jane Austen"};
int count = titles.length;
for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) {
    System.out.println("Title: " + titles[i] + ", Author: " + authors[i]);
}

// Your code here

Need a hint?

Define a class with fields and a constructor. Then create an array of objects and loop through it to print details.