Posted: 3/10/2007 11:43 PM
Post subject: Programming Books
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ZeXr0
Joined: 8/27/2006
Posts: 883
Hi, i'm currently reading Code Complete Second Edition and it's a great book for anyone that do programming. It gives a lot of advice on how to start a project, and how to see if you are on the right path. Then a coworker of mine told me that I could read Rapid development, and I'll be reading it after code complete in a couple of week. Anyone knows other good programming books ?
Posted: 3/11/2007 12:58 AM
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Tub
Joined: 6/25/2005
Posts: 1377
I've read the first Edition of Code Complete a couple of years ago, and today I'm glad I didn't follow their examples. I don't know if the Second Edition is better - at least it'll be less outdated.
m00
Posted: 3/11/2007 1:01 AM
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laughing_gas
Former player
Joined: 10/1/2006
Posts: 1102
Location: boot_camp
I tried a lot of programming books, but I could never really get in depth. I fail at programming.
Borg Collective wrote:
Negotiation is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You will be assimilated.
Posted: 3/11/2007 1:20 AM
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ZeXr0
Joined: 8/27/2006
Posts: 883
Tub, in what context are you glad to have not followed the example. I'm currently working in a project which include a master system, a couple of subsystem, having 250 forms and 300 classes, 11 modules. And I find really usefull most of the exemple so far. Having known most of the techniques would have been a great help a couple of years ago, now I can only which we will follow most of these example when we'll switch the code to .net.
Posted: 3/11/2007 6:15 AM
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Gorash
Joined: 4/16/2005
Posts: 251
Programming Perl. Perl Cookbook. I'm always delighted as to how many weird stuff is already thought out in these books.
Posted: 3/11/2007 7:14 PM
(Edited: 4/24/2007 11:56 PM)
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Deep_Loner
Joined: 12/26/2006
Posts: 256
Location: United States of America
Tub wrote:
I've read the first Edition of Code Complete a couple of years ago, and today I'm glad I didn't follow their examples. I don't know if the Second Edition is better - at least it'll be less outdated.
From someone who knows a bit about programming but has never worked in the industry before, please tell me a bit more about what you didn't like about that book. Admittedly I haven't read the first edition, but my thoughts after reading some of the second edition were that it seemed to be very well reserached and thought out.
Posted: 3/11/2007 8:16 PM
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Tub
Joined: 6/25/2005
Posts: 1377
I'm too lazy to re-read the book to remind me of the details (also, I'm ~400 km away from that book), so one example shall suffice: in the first edition they advocated hungarian notation and other coding styles that are practically unmaintainable. It did sound well-researched and thought out, and there were some good arguments for using hungarian notation. Using it is still a PITA and a lot of work that'll only pay off in a small fraction of scenarios: when skimming badly written code with huge variable scopes. Yeah, Microsoft stopped using hungarian notation by now, and I really hope all the other WTFs are gone in the second edition as well. I'm just saying that you shouldn't blindly trust that book.
m00
Posted: 3/11/2007 8:50 PM
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I tend to agree that hungarian notation is seldom worth using. As a rule of thumb: If in a code it's not clear whether a name is eg. a local variable, a member variable, a constant or, heaven forbid, a global variable, then your code is too complicated anyways. Hungarian notation is not going to help.
Posted: 3/11/2007 9:43 PM
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Tub
Joined: 6/25/2005
Posts: 1377
Using markup to distinguish between CONSTANTS, ClassNames and local_variables isn't unheard of, but it can be done without sacrificing readability with ugly prefixes. I consider the prefixing of variable types to be worse, like bDone, sErrorMessage or uiCounter. (10 lines of rant about hungarian notation deleted) this is getting a little bit offtopic :)
m00
Posted: 3/11/2007 9:54 PM
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ZeXr0
Joined: 8/27/2006
Posts: 883
Well Tub, I agree it's useless, but remember that things change over the time, sure, if you read a book of 1990 in 2002, there's a lot of thing that changed. But the second edition is more up to date, with new standard :P And some of them will surely be out of date in a couple of year. For the moment, it's a good book so far ;)
Posted: 3/16/2007 11:58 AM
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
When I code C++, I tend to use uppercase as "notation" for different things, even though I must admit that I could do it better yet. I use ALL_UPPERCASE for constants, StartingCapitals for types and classes, and lowercaseFirstLetter for variables and functions. (Admittedly it might be worth distinguishing between member functions and global functions, but I usually don't do that.) Sometimes I try to use memberVariable_ notation for member variables, but too often I'm too lazy to do that.