Many translations are available including Dutch (first edition only), French (1+2), German (1), Italian (1), Japanese (1+2), Persian (1), Polish (2), Romanian (1), Russian (2), Serbian (2), and Spanish (2).

The book presents object technology as an answer to major issues of software engineering, with a special emphasis on addressing the software quality factors of correctness, robustness, extendibility and reusability.

It starts with an examination of the issues of software quality, then introduces abstract data types as the theoretical basis for object technology and proceeds with the main object-oriented techniques: classes, objects, genericity, inheritance, Design by Contract, concurrency, and persistence.

A few months after publication of the second edition, a reader posted on Usenet[citation needed] his discovery that the book's 36 chapters alternatively start with the letters E, I, F, F, E, L, a pattern being repeated 6 times.

Also, in the Appendix, titled "Epilogue, In Full Frankness Exposing the Language" (in first initials), the first letters of each paragraph spell the same pattern.