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,
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Strengths and Weaknesses of Novice Software Developers
Our observations revealed that novice software developers demonstrate a wide variety of abilities as well as deficiencies. Among their strengths are:
Programming
Reading and writing specifications
Debugging (persistence and hypothesis generation)
Weaknesses include:
Communications
Cognition
Orientation (engaging with a large code base and preexisting software team)
Strengths
From our observations, we could see that novice software developers were very well prepared by their universities for programming, design, and debugging. They were capable of using IDEs to code, command-line tools to analyze files, and online documentation to learn about unfamiliar APIs. They tried not just to complete their tasks, but to understand why the code change was the right one to make. Several of them practiced copy-paste coding, either from documentation or from other sections of their team’s codebase. When debugging, all of the novices demonstrated prolific hypothesis generation (e.g., see the previous section Task Sample) and persistence in trying all possibilities before contemplating giving up if nothing worked. Most took these incremental failures to solve problems in stride, and though complaints about unfamiliar and undocumented tools pervaded their self-commentary, they seldom reported this to others.
One subject had to review design specifications for two software features. This led to frequent discussions with the head of the team, leading to ...
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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.