March 2015
Beginner
480 pages
14h 12m
English
Content preview from Beginning Software Engineering
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CHAPTER 7 Development
A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
—DOUG LINDER
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
—MARTIN GOLDING
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:
- Tools that are useful to programmers
- How to decide which algorithms are better than others
- How to use top-down design to turn designs into code
- Programming tips that can make code easier to debug and maintain
To many programmers, development is the heart of software engineering. It’s where fingers hit the keyboard and churn out the actual program code of the system. Without development, there is no application.
As is the case with other stages of software development, the edges of development are a bit blurry. Low-level design may identify the classes that a program will need, but it may not spell out every method that the classes must provide and it might provide few details about how those methods work. That means the development stage must still include some design work as developers figure out how to build the classes.
Similarly, the next stage of software engineering, testing, often begins before development is completely finished. In fact, it’s best to test software early and often. It’s widely known that bugs are easiest to find and fix if they’re detected soon after they’re created, so if possible you should test every method you write as soon as it’s finished (sometimes ...
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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.