Real-World Software Development

Chapter 8. Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, you’ve hopefully enjoyed the book. We enjoyed writing it as well. In this concluding chapter you’ll learn about where to go next in your programming career. We’ll offer some advice on how to evolve your skills and push yourself to the next level in your career as a developer.

Project-Based Structure

The project-based structure of the book was designed to help you understand software development concepts more easily. You were presented topics within software projects in order to understand the context of software engineering decisions. Context is critical in software engineering—decisions that may be right in one context aren’t so applicable in another. Many developers overuse and abuse subclassing due to misunderstanding that it’s a mechanism for code reuse. Hopefully we’ve discouraged that idea in your mind in Chapter 4.

But you can’t simply hope to read a book and magically become an expert software developer. It takes practice, experience, and patience. This book is just here to help optimize and improve the process. That’s why we’ve added an “Iterating on You” section to each chapter—they offer suggestions as to how you can take the material in this book further and improve your understanding.

Iterating on You

As a software developer you probably often approach projects in an iterative fashion. That’s to say, slice off the highest priority week or two’s worth of work items, implement them, and then use the feedback in order ...