February 2010
Beginner
255 pages
6h 10m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
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Chapter 63. Own (and Refactor) the Build
IT IS NOT UNCOMMON for teams that are otherwise highly disciplined about coding practices to neglect build scripts, either out of a belief that they are merely an unimportant detail or from a fear that they are complex and need to be tended to by the cult of release engineering. Unmaintainable build scripts with duplication and errors cause problems of the same magnitude as those in poorly factored code.
One rationale for why disciplined, skilled developers treat the build as something secondary to their work is that build scripts are often written in a different language than source code. Another is that the build is not really “code.” These justifications fly in the face of the reality that most software developers enjoy learning new languages, and that the build is what creates executable artifacts for developers and end users to test and run. The code is useless without being built, and the build is what defines the component architecture of the application. The build is an essential part of the development process, and decisions about the build process can make the code and the coding simpler.
Build scripts written using the wrong idioms are difficult to maintain and, more significantly, improve. It is worth spending some time to understand the right way to make a change. Bugs can appear when an application is built with the ...
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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.Julian F.
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.
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.Amir M.
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.