July 2021
Intermediate
1h 15m
English
on-demand course
Bad Programming 101 - Part 2: Become a Better Coder by Learning How (Not) to Program
with Karl Beecher
Closed Captioning available in English
Overview
Learn to avoid bad programming practices that create low-quality code that is difficult to maintain or test, and exhibits properties such as brittleness, low comprehensibility, and high defect density. This video takes a humorous slant on the typical programming practice manual by reversing the usual approach. Its approach is to jokingly assume that you wish to be an agent of chaos and sneak bad code into a software project in order to ruin its chances of success, or frustrate your colleagues by producing unreadable, error-prone garbage. Under this pretense, the video teaches how to avoid the kind of bad habits that introduce bugs or cause code contributions to be outright rejected.
The bad practices are organised into topics that form the basis of programming (layout, variables, loops, etc.). At the end of each topic, a more serious voice chimes in temporarily to explain why the ‘advice’ just given is actually poor and suggests some better alternative practices. By sourcing classic programming guidebooks, empirical studies, and a range of coding conventions from some of the most successful software projects, this video explains the reasoning behind good programming practices.
This video – Part 2 of the series – focuses on coding practices at the ‘modular scale’, i.e. at the level of organisational building blocks such as subroutines and classes.
These topics form the basis of good programming style and are important for anyone embarking on a career in professional programming or wishing to contribute to a software project. Normally, beginner programmers learn these good practices by going through a period of making mistakes and learning from them. This video helps to shorten that learning process by teaching a core of good practices and will enable you to become a productive programmer faster.
What You Will Learn
- Become a better coder by learning how (not) to program
- Choose your tools wisely
- Think of programming as problem solving
- Discover the consequences of a program’s appearance and overall structure
- Avoid bad habits and common mistakes
- See how poor error-handling makes for unstable programs
Who This Video Is For
You should have some practical programming knowledge (i.e. you can program in at least one programming language), but little to no professional experience. You are either still undergoing training in software development, or are at the beginning of your programming career. You have, at most, 1-2 years of professional experience.
Become 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,
and much more.
Watch now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
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.