May 2008
Intermediate to advanced
172 pages
4h 54m
English
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Chapter 9. Style
Here is a silly stately style indeed!
—William Shakespeare, The First Part of Henry the
Sixth
Computer programs are the most complex things that humans make. Programs are made up of a huge number of parts, expressed as functions, statements, and expressions that are arranged in sequences that must be virtually free of error. The runtime behavior has little resemblance to the program that implements it. Software is usually expected to be modified over the course of its productive life. The process of converting one correct program into a different correct program is extremely challenging.
Good programs have a structure that anticipates—but is not overly burdened by—the possible modifications that will be required in the future. Good programs also have a clear presentation. If a program is expressed well, then we have the best chance of being able to understand it so that it can be successfully modified or repaired.
These concerns are true for all programming languages, and are especially true for JavaScript. JavaScript's loose typing and excessive error tolerance provide little compile-time assurance of our programs' quality, so to compensate, we should code with strict discipline.
JavaScript contains a large set of weak or problematic features that can undermine our attempts to write good programs. We should obviously avoid JavaScript's worst features. Surprisingly, perhaps, we should also avoid the features that are often useful but occasionally hazardous. Such features ...
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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.
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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.