10

Optimizing and Testing Your Code

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

—Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

It would be wonderful if the code we wrote were perfect. It would run in the most efficient way possible, and it would perform exactly as we intended from the first time. There would not be one unused line or expression. It would execute correctly for the standard cases and every bizarre twist our software users can throw at us.

In this chapter, we face reality. Code usually has one or more bugs in it at the beginning. Your programming editor, such as Visual Studio Code, may help you with the syntax errors, but the semantic ones can be harder to find. We first learn about widely used techniques for testing your code, ...

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