October 2010
Beginner to intermediate
624 pages
24h 9m
English
Content preview from Making SoftwareBecome 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,
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.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.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.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.
A Language Shoot-Out over a Peculiar Search Algorithm
The first opportunity arose after I had collected a number of implementations of the same program for a different study. That study [Prechelt and Unger 2001] measured the effects of receiving a training in Watts Humphrey’s Personal Software Process (PSP, [Humphrey 1995]). The PSP claims big improvements in estimation accuracy, defect density, and productivity, yet our study found the effect to be a lot smaller than expected.
Half of the graduate student subjects in that study had received PSP training, and the others had received other programming-related training. In the study, they all solved exactly the same task (described in the next section), but could choose their programming language freely. I ended up with 40 implementations (24 in Java, 11 in C++, and 5 in C), and it occurred to me that it would be quite interesting to compare not just the PSP-trained programmers against the non-PSP-trained programmers, but to treat the programs as three sets stemming from different languages. It would be even more interesting to have further implementations in several scripting languages to compare.
I posted a public “call for implementations” in several Usenet newsgroups (this was in 1999), and within four weeks received another 40 implementations from volunteers: 13 in Perl, 13 in Python, 4 in Rexx, and 10 in TCL.
At this point, your skeptical brain ought to yell, “Wait! How can he know these people are of comparable competence?” A ...
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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.