Object-oriented programming is radically different from the traditional software-writing methods. Instead of having data manipulated by commands, the data is the focus of the code. This is much easier to write and think about because data are grouped into objects. Objects can contain data (such as integers and characters), other objects, and functions. Together these groups are known as classes. A programmer can easily define his own classes and use its functions to efficently process data. For more info, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming.