Data-Oriented Programming: Reduce Software Complexity (Unabridged‪)‬

Eliminate the unavoidable complexity of object-oriented designs. The innovative data-oriented programming paradigm makes your systems less complex by making it simpler to access and manipulate data.

In Data-Oriented Programming you will learn how to:

Separate code from data
Represent data with generic data structures
Manipulate data with general-purpose functions
Manage state without mutating data
Control concurrency in highly scalable systems
Write data-oriented unit tests
Specify the shape of your data
Benefit from polymorphism without objects
Debug programs without a debugger


Data-Oriented Programming is a one-of-a-kind guide that introduces the data-oriented paradigm. This groundbreaking approach represents data with generic immutable data structures. It simplifies state management, eases concurrency, and does away with the common problems you’ll find in object-oriented code. The book presents powerful new ideas through conversations, code snippets, and diagrams that help you quickly grok what’s great about DOP. Best of all, the paradigm is language-agnostic—you’ll learn to write DOP code that can be implemented in JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Clojure, and also in traditional OO languages like Java or C#.

About the technology

Code that combines behavior and data, as is common in object-oriented designs, can introduce almost unmanageable complexity for state management. The Data-oriented programming (DOP) paradigm simplifies state management by holding application data in immutable generic data structures and then performing calculations using nonmutating general-purpose functions.

About the audience

For programmers who have experience with a high-level programming language like JavaScript, Java, Python, C#, Clojure, or Ruby.

About the author

Yehonathan Sharvit has over 20 years of experience as a software engineer. He blogs, speaks at conferences, and leads Data-Oriented Programming workshops around the world.