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 72. Reinvent the Wheel Often
Just use something that exists—it’s silly to reinvent the wheel.…
HAVE YOU EVER HEARD THIS OR SOME VARIATION THEREOF? Sure you have! Every developer and student probably hears comments like this frequently. Why, though? Why is reinventing the wheel so frowned upon? Because, more often than not, existing code is working code. It has already gone through some sort of quality control and rigorous testing, and is being used successfully. Additionally, the time and effort invested in reinvention are unlikely to pay off as well as using an existing product or codebase. Should you bother reinventing the wheel? Why? When?
Perhaps you have seen publications about patterns in software development, or books on software design. These books can be sleepers, regardless of how wonderful the information contained in them is. The same way that watching a movie about sailing is very different from going sailing, so too is using existing code versus designing your own software from the ground up, testing it, breaking it, repairing it, and improving it along the way.
Reinventing the wheel is not just an exercise in where to place code constructs: it is about how to get an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of various components that already exist. Do you know how memory managers work? Virtual paging? Could you implement these yourself? How about double-linked ...
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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.