February 2010
Beginner
255 pages
6h 10m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.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.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.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.
Chapter 46. Know Your Limits
Man’s got to know his limitations.
—
YOUR RESOURCES ARE LIMITED. You only have so much time and money to do your work, including the time and money needed to keep your knowledge, skills, and tools up to date. You can only work so hard, so fast, so smart, and so long. Your tools are only so powerful. Your target machines are only so powerful. So you have to respect the limits of your resources.
How to respect those limits? Know yourself, know your people, know your budgets, and know your stuff. Especially, as a software engineer, know the space and time complexity of your data structures and algorithms, and the architecture and performance characteristics of your systems. Your job is to create an optimal marriage of software and systems.
Space and time complexity are given as the function O(f(n)), which for n equal the size of the input is the asymptotic space or time required as n grows to infinity. Important complexity classes for f(n) include ln(n), n, n ln(n), ne, and en. As graphing these functions clearly shows, as n gets bigger, O(ln(n)) is ever so much smaller than O(n) and O(n ln(n)), which are ever so much smaller than O(ne) and O(en). As Sean Parent puts it, for achievable n, all complexity classes amount to near-constant, near-linear, or near-infinite.
Complexity analysis is measured in terms of an abstract machine, but software ...
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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.