October 2008
Intermediate to advanced
368 pages
10h 9m
English
Content preview from Algorithms in a NutshellBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 3. Patterns and Domains
We build software to solve problems. During the decades since the first programmed computer printed answers to previously unapproachable problems—such as computing the 400,052,412,247th digit of π—programmers have written countless programs to solve numerous problems. Programmers spent hours happily writing code to solve the problem at hand, while at the same time others also were coding solutions to identical, or very similar, problems. There are several reasons programmers create unique solutions rather than seeking an existing solution. One reason, of course, is the tendency to believe that we can always build a better mousetrap. Programming for many of us has the same appeal that the game of chess has for chess aficionados. Some reasons are more important than others when considering why programmers continue to write the same solutions for problems from scratch:
The programmer doesn't realize that the problem has already been solved. We'll look into this further when we discuss problem domains.
Even if the programmer knows the problem has been solved in similar cases, it's not clear that the existing code will actually fit the specific problem facing the programmer.
It's not easy to find code that really solves the problem at hand or code that can be easily modified to solve that problem.
Patterns: A Communication Language
In the late 1980s, a few visionary software developers began looking for new ways to communicate their designs with one another. ...
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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.
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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.