July 2005
Intermediate to advanced
544 pages
13h 8m
English
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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.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.
Chapter 19. Miscellanea
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
—
How to Save Your Own Life
This chapter contains a handful of guidelines that do not fit cleanly into any of the previous categories. They cover reasons for revision control, the intricacies of interfacing with other languages, the care and feeding of configuration files, the trouble with tied variables, the complexities of caching, flaws in formats, optimal optimization, and the cunning cruelty of cleverness.
Revision Control
Use a revision control system.
Maintaining control over the creation and modification of your source code[124] is utterly essential for robust team-based development. Just as you wouldn't use an editor without an Undo button or a word processor that can't merge documents, so too you shouldn't use a filesystem you can't rewind, or a development environment that can't integrate the work of many contributors.
Programmers make mistakes, and occasionally those mistakes will be catastrophic. They will reformat the disk with the most recent version of the code. Or they'll mistype an editor macro and write zeros all through the source of a critical core module. Or two developers will unwittingly edit the same file at the same time and half their changes will be lost. Revision control systems can prevent those kinds of problems.
Moreover, occasionally the very best debugging technique is to just give up, stop trying to get yesterday's modifications to work correctly, ...
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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.