By: Jonathan Lebensold
Why aren’t you teaching me how to make a blogging / shopping cart application?
Because the Pragmatic Programmers did a fantastic job when they wrote their famous Rails book “Agile Web Development with Rails.” Crowds ooo-ed and aaa-ed when the rails camp wrote tutorials that described “how to make a blog in ten [...]

I got this question put to me recently:
Since you say it’s bad practice to access object properties directly from outside the class, is it then good practice to declare all variables as protected or private to force yourself to not?
My answer:
Yes.
Many OO techniques are designed for situations where you will have more than one [...]