Aspect-oriented programming is a subject matter that has been very difficult for me to find any good information on. My old Software Engineering textbook only mentions it briefly (and vaguely), and the wikipedia and various other tutorials/articles I've been able to find on it give ultra-academic, highly-abstracted definitions of just what it is, how to use it, and when to use it. Definitions I just don't seem to understand.
My (very poor) understanding of AOP is that there are many aspects of producing a high-quality software system that don't fit neatly into a nice little cohesive package. Some classes, such as Loggers, Validators, DatabaseQueries, etc., will be used all over your codebase and thus will be highly-coupled. My (again, very poor) understanding of AOP is that it is concerned with the best practices of how to handle these types of "universally-coupled" packages.
Question : Is this true, or am I totally off? If I'm completely wrong, can someone please give a concise, laymen explanation for what AOP is, an example of a so-called aspect, and perhaps even provide a simple code example?
Separation of Concerns is a fundamental principle in software development, there is a classic paper by David Parnas On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules that may introduce you to the subject and also read Uncle Bob's SOLID Principles.
But then there are Cross Cutting concerns that might be included in many use cases like authentication, authorization, validation, logging, transaction handling, exception handling, caching, etc that spawn all the layers in software. And if you want to tackle the problem without duplication and employing the DRY principle, you must handle it in a sophisticated way.
You must use declarative programming, that simply in .net could be annotating a method or a property by an attribute and what happened later is changing the behavior of code in runtime depending of those annotations.
You can find a nice chapter on this topic in Sommerville's Software engineering book
Useful links C2 wiki CrossCuttingConcern, MSDN, How to Address Crosscutting Concerns in Aspect Oriented Software Development