Skip to Content
Head First Software Development
book

Head First Software Development

by Dan Pilone, Russ Miles
December 2007
Beginner to intermediate
495 pages
10h 45m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Head First Software Development

Chapter 6. Version Control: Defensive development

image with no caption

When it comes to writing great software, Safety First! Writing great software isn’t easy...especially when you’ve got to make sure your code works, and make sure it keeps working. All it takes is one typo, one bad decision from a co-worker, one crashed hard drive, and suddenly all your work goes down the drain. But with version control, you can make sure your code is always safe in a code repository, you can undo mistakes, and you can make bug fixes—to new and old versions of your software.

You’ve got a new contract—BeatBox Pro

Congratulations—you’ve been getting rave reviews from iSwoon, and you’ve landed a new contract. You’ve been hired to add two new features to the legendary Head First Java BeatBox project. BeatBox is a multi-player drum machine that lets you send messages and drum loops to other users over the network.

Like every other software development project out there, the customer wants things done as soon as possible. They even let you bring along Bob, one of your junior developers, to help out. Since the stories aren’t big enough to have more than one person work on them at a time, you’ll work on one and Bob will work on the other. Here are the user stories for the new features you’ve got to add:

image with no caption

Note

*You can download the ...

Become 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,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’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.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI 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.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’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.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'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.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Head First Software Architecture

Head First Software Architecture

Raju Gandhi, Mark Richards, Neal Ford
Head First Design Patterns, 2nd Edition

Head First Design Patterns, 2nd Edition

Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Robson

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596527358Errata Page