December 2006
Intermediate to advanced
610 pages
22h 58m
English
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Chapter 1: On the Defensive
Mull It Over
Can you have too much defensive programming?
Yes—just as too many comments can degrade code readability, so can many defensive checks, if they are bad. Redundant checks can be avoided with careful coding; for example, by making a good choice of types.
Should you add an assertion to your code for every bug you find and fix?
Fundamentally, it’s not a bad practice. But think about where you’d add the assertions. Many, many faults are due to incorrect honoring of API contracts. If you passed garbage into a function, you would want to put some precondition checking inside that function, rather than put a test at the call site. If the function returned garbage, you would either fix the function so that it won’t again ...
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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.