February 2010
Beginner
255 pages
6h 10m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
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Chapter 16. A Comment on Comments
IN MY FIRST PROGRAMMING CLASS IN COLLEGE, my teacher handed out two BASIC coding sheets. On the board, the assignment
read, “Write a program to input and average 10 bowling scores.” Then the teacher left
the room. How hard could this be? I don’t remember my final solution, but I’m sure it
had a FOR/NEXT loop in it and couldn’t have been more
than 15 lines long in total. Coding sheets—for you kids reading this, yes, we used to
write code out longhand before actually entering it into a computer—allowed for around
70 lines of code each. I was very confused as to why the teacher would have given us two
sheets. Since my handwriting has always been atrocious, I used the second one to recopy
my code very neatly, hoping to get a couple of extra points for style.
Much to my surprise, when I received the assignment back at the start of the next class, I received a barely passing grade. (It was to be an omen to me for the rest of my time in college.) Scrawled across the top of my neatly copied code was “No comments?”
It was not enough that the teacher and I both knew what the program was supposed to do. Part of the point of the assignment was to teach me that my code should explain itself to the next programmer coming behind me. It’s a lesson I’ve not forgotten.
Comments are not evil. They are as necessary to programming as basic branching or looping constructs. ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.