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This is my summary of the The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. I use it while learning and as quick reference. It is not intended to be an standalone substitution of the book so if you really want to learn the concepts here presented, buy and read the book and use this repository as a reference and guide.
If you are the publisher and think this repository should not be public, just write me an email at hugomatilla [at] gmail [dot] com and I will make it private.
Contributions: Issues, comments and pull requests are super welcome 😃 There is a Quick Reference at the end.
Tip 1: Care About Your Craft
Why spend your life developing software unless you care about doing it well?
Tip 2: Think! About Your Work
Turn off the autopilot and take control. Constantly critique and appraise your work.
Tip 3: Provide Options, Don't Make Lame Excuses
Instead of excuses, provide options. Don't say it can't be done; explain what can be done to salvage the situation.
One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don't care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner's desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.
Tip 4: Don't Live with Broken Windows
Don't mess up the carpet when fixing the broken window.
It's time to bring out the stones. Work out what you can reasonably ask for. Develop it well. Once you've got it, show people, and let them marvel. Then say "of course, it would be better if we added…."
People find it easier to join an ongoing success.
Tip 5: Be a Catalyst for Change
Most software disasters start out too small to notice, and most project overruns happen a day at a time.
If you take a frog and drop it into boiling water, it will jump straight back out again. However, if you place the frog in a pan of cold water, then gradually heat it, the frog won't notice the slow increase in temperature and will stay put until cooked.
Don't be like the frog. Keep an eye on the big picture.
Tip 6: Remember the Big Picture
The scope and quality of the system you produce should be specified as part of that system's requirements.
Tip 7: Make Quality a Requirements Issue
Great software today is often preferable to perfect software tomorrow. Know When to Stop
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Tip 8: Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio
You need to ensure that the knowledge in your portfolio is accurate and unswayed by either vendor or media hype.
Tip 9: Critically Analyze What You Read and Hear
Tip 10: It's Both What You Say and the Way You Say It
The problem arises when you need to change a representation of things that are across all the code base. Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.
Tip 11: DRY—Don't Repeat Yourself
Types of duplication:
Tip 12: Make it easy to reuse
Two or more things are orthogonal if changes in one do not affect any of the others. Also called cohesion. Write "shy" code.
Tip 13: Eliminate Effects Between Unrelated Things
Benefits:
Be prepared for changes.
Tip 14: There are no Final Decisions.
In new projects your users requirements may be vague. Use of new algorithms, techniques, languages, or libraries unknowns will come. And environment will change over time before you are done. We're looking for something that gets us from a requirement to some aspect of the final system quickly, visibly, and repeatably.
Tip 15: Use Tracer Bullets to Find the Target
Advantages:
Tracer bullets show what you're hitting. This may not always be the target. You then adjust your aim until they're on target. That's the point.
With a prototype, you're aiming to explore specific aspects of the final system. Tracer code is used to know how the application as a whole hangs together.
Prototyping generates disposable code. Tracer code is lean but complete, and forms part of the skeleton of the final system.
We build software prototypes to analyze and expose risk, and to offer chances for correction at a greatly reduced cost.
Prototype anything that:
Samples:
Tip 16: Prototype to Learn
Avoid details:
Prototyping Architecture:
Never deploy the prototype
Tip 17: Program Close to the Problem domain
Tip 18: Estimate to Avoid Surprises
First: Do they need high accuracy, or are they looking for a ballpark figure?
Second: Scale time estimates properly
| Duration | Quote estimate in |
|---|---|
| 1-15 days | days |
| 3-8 weeks | weeks |
| 8-30 weeks | months |
| 30+ weeks | think hard before giving an estimate |
Ask someone who's been in a similar situation in the past.
The only way to determine the timetable for a project is by gaining experience on that same project. Practice incremental development, repeating the following steps:
The refinement and confidence in the schedule gets better and better each iteration
Tip 19: Iterate the Schedule with the Code
"I'll get back to you."
Start keeping a log of your estimates. For each, track how accurate you turned out to be. If your error was greater than 50%, try to find out where your estimate went wrong.
Tip 20: Keep Knowledge in plain text
Tip 21: Use the power of command Shells
Can't you do everything equally well by pointing and clicking in a GUI? No. A benefit of GUIs is WYSIWYG—what you see is what you get. The disadvantage is WYSIAYG—what you see is all you get.
Tip 22: Use a Single Editor Well
Tip 23: Always Use Source Code Control
Tip 24: Fix the Problem, Not the Blame
Tip 25: Don't Panic
Don't waste a single neuron on the train of thought that begins "but that can't happen" because quite clearly it can, and has. Try to discover the root cause of a problem, not just this particular appearance of it.
Use the tools that the debugger offers you. Pen and paper can also help.
Now what happens before and after.
Explain the bug to someone else.
It is possible that a bug exists in the OS, the compiler, or a third-party product—but this should not be your first thought.
Tip 26: "select" Isn't Broken
Tip 27: Don't Assume It—Prove It
Tip 28: Learn a Text Manipulation Language
Tip 29: Write Code That Writes Code Two main types of code generators:
Keep the input format simple, and the code generator becomes simple.
You can use code generators to write just about any output: HTML, XML, plain text - any text that might be an input somewhere else in your project.
Tip 30: You can't write Perfect Software
No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. Pragmatic Programmers don't trust themselves, either.
A correct program is one that does no more and no less than it claims to do. Use:
Tip 31: Design with Contracts
Write "lazy" code: be strict in what you will accept before you begin, and promise as little as possible in return.
Simply enumerating at design time:
You can use assertions to apply DBC in some range. (Assertions are not propagated in subclasses)
DBC enforce Crashing Early
All errors give you information. Pragmatic Programmers tell themselves that if there is an error, something very, very bad has happened.
Tip 32: Crash Early
A dead program normally does a lot less damage than a crippled one.
When your code discovers that something that was supposed to be impossible just happened, your program is no longer viable.
Tip 33: If It Can't Happen, Use Assertions to Ensure That It Won't
Tip 34: Use Exceptions for Exceptional Problems
The program must run if all the exception handlers are removed If your code tries to open a file for reading and that file does not exist, should an exception be raised
When managing resources: memory, transactions, threads, flies, timers—all kinds of things with limited availability, we have to close, finish, delete, deallocate them when we are done.
Tip 35: Finish What You Start
Use finally to free resources.
Be careful about how many other modules you interact with and how you came to interact with them.
Traversing relationships between objects directly can quickly lead to a combinatorial explosion.
book.pages().last().text().
// Instead, we're supposed to go with:
book.textOfLastPage()Symptoms:
The Law of Demeter for functions states that any method of an object should call only methods belonging to:
class Demeter {
private A a;
void m(B b) {
a.hello(); //itself
b.hello(); //any parameters that were passed to the method
new Z().hello(); // any object it created
Singleton.INSTANCE.hello(); // any directly held component
}
}Tip 36: Minimize Coupling Between Modules
Using The Law of Demeter will make your code more adaptable and robust, but at a cost: you will be writing a large number of wrapper methods that simply forward the request on to a delegate. imposing both a runtime cost and a space overhead. Balance the pros and cons for your particular application.
"Out with the details!" Get them out of the code. While we're at it, we can make our code highly configurable and "soft"—that is, easily adaptable to changes.
Tip 37: Configure, Don't Integrate
We want to configure and drive the application via metadata as much as possible. Program for the general case, and put the specifics somewhere else —outside the compiled code base
Tip 38: Put Abstractions in Code Details in Metadata
Benefits:
A flexible approach is to write programs that can reload their configuration while they're running.
Two aspects of time:
We need to allow for concurrency and to think about decoupling any time or order dependencies. Reduce any time-based dependencies
Use activity diagrams to maximize parallelism by identifying activities that could be performed in parallel, but aren't.
Tip 39: Analyze Workflow to Improve Concurrency
Balance load among multiple consumer processes: the hungry consumer model.
In a hungry consumer model, you replace the central scheduler with a number of independent consumer tasks and a centralized work queue. Each consumer task grabs a piece from the work queue and goes on about the business of processing it. As each task finishes its work, it goes back to the queue for some more. This way, if any particular task gets bogged down, the others can pick up the slack, and each individual component can proceed at its own pace. Each component is temporally decoupled from the others.
Tip 40: Design Using Services
Programming with threads imposes some design constraints—and that's a good thing.
Thinking about concurrency and time-ordered dependencies can lead you to design cleaner interfaces as well.
Tip 41: Always Design for Concurrency
You can be flexible as to how the application is deployed: standalone, client-server, or n-tier.
If we design to allow for concurrency, we can more easily meet scalability or performance requirements when the time comes—and if the time never comes, we still have the benefit of a cleaner design.
Objects should be able to register to receive only the events they need, and should never be sent events they don't need.
Use this publish/subscribe mechanism to implement a very important design concept: the separation of a model from views of the model.
Separates the model from both the GUI that represents it and the controls that manage the view.
Advantage:
Tip 42: Separate Views from Models
The controller is more of a coordination mechanism, and doesn't have to be related to any sort of input device.
A blackboard system lets us decouple our objects from each other completely, providing a forum where knowledge consumers and producers can exchange data anonymously and asynchronously.
With Blackboard systems, you can store active objects—not just data—on the blackboard, and retrieve them by partial matching of fields (via templates and wildcards) or by subtypes.
Functions that a Blackboard system should have:
Organizing Your Blackboard by partitioning it when working on large cases.
Tip 43: Use Blackboards to Coordinate Workflow
We should avoid programming by coincidence—relying on luck and accidental successes— in favor of programming deliberately. Tip 44: Don't Program by Coincidence
Pragmatic Programmers estimate the resources that algorithms use—time, processor, memory, and so on.
bool IsFirstElementNull(IList<string> elements)
{
return elements[0] == null;
} Int BinarySearch(list, target)
{
lo = 1, hi = size(list)
while (lo <= hi){
mid = lo + (hi-lo)/2
if (list[mid] == target) return mid
else if (list[mid] < target) lo = mid+1
else hi = mid-1
}
} bool ContainsValue(IList<string> elements, string value)
{
foreach (var element in elements)
{
if (element == value) return true;
}
return false;
} bool ContainsDuplicates(IList<string> elements)
{
for (var outer = 0; outer < elements.Count; outer++)
{
for (var inner = 0; inner < elements.Count; inner++)
{
// Don't compare with self
if (outer == inner) continue;
if (elements[outer] == elements[inner]) return true;
}
}
return false;
} int Fibonacci(int number)
{
if (number <= 1) return number;
return Fibonacci(number - 2) + Fibonacci(number - 1);
}Tip 45: Estimate the Order of Your Algorithms
Tip 46: Test Your Estimates
Be pragmatic about choosing appropriate algorithms—the fastest one is not always the best for the job.
Be wary of premature optimization. Make sure an algorithm really is a bottleneck before investing time improving it.
Code needs to evolve; it's not a static thing.
Tip 47: Refactor Early, Refactor Often
Build testability into the software from the very beginning, and test each piece thoroughly before trying to wire them together.
Testing done on each module, in isolation, to verify its behavior. A software unit test is code that exercises a module.
This will tell us two things:
Tip 48: Design to Test
There's no better way to fix errors than by avoiding them in the first place. Build the tests before you implement the code.
By making the test code readily accessible, you are providing developers who may use your code with two invaluable resources:
You must run them, and run them often.
Test harnesses should include the following capabilities:
Tip 49: Test Your Software, or Your Users Will
If you do use a wizard, and you don't understand all the code that it produces, you won't be in control of your own application.
Tip 50: Don't Use Wizard Code You Don't Understand
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away….
Tip 51: Don't Gather Requirements—Dig for Them
Policy may end up as metadata in the application.
Gathering requirements in this way naturally leads you to a system that is well factored to support metadata.
Tip 52: Work with a User to Think Like a User
Use "use cases"
Requirements are not architecture. Requirements are not design, nor are they the user interface. Requirements are need.
Tip 53: Abstractions Live Longer than Details
What can we do to prevent requirements from creeping up on us?
The key to managing growth of requirements is to point out each new feature's impact on the schedule to the project sponsors.
It's very hard to succeed on a project where the users and developers refer to the same thing by different names or, even worse, refer to different things by the same name.
Tip 54: Use a Project Glossary
Publishing project documents to internal Web sites for easy access by all participants.
The key to solving puzzles is both to recognize the constraints placed on you and to recognize the degrees of freedom you do have, for in those you'll find your solution.
Tip 55: Don't Think Outside the Box—Find the Box
If you can not find the solution, step back and ask yourself these questions:
If you sit down to start typing and there's some nagging doubt in your mind, heed it.
Tip 56: Listen to Nagging Doubts—Start When You're Ready
Start prototyping. Choose an area that you feel will be difficult and begin producing some kind of proof of concept, and be sure to remember why you're doing it and that it is a prototype.
Writing a specification is quite a responsibility.
You should know when to stop:
Tip 57: Some Things Are Better Done than Described
Tip 58: Don't Be a Slave to Formal Methods
Formal methods have some serious shortcomings:
Never underestimate the cost of adopting new tools and methods.
Absolutely but remember that is just one more tool in the toolbox.
Tip 59: Expensive Tools Do Not Produce Better Designs
Pragmatic techniques that help an individual can work for teams.
Quality is a team issue.
Teams as a whole should not tolerate broken windows—those small imperfections that no one fixes.
Quality can come only from the individual contributions of all team members.
People assume that someone else is handling an issue, or that the team leader must have OK'd a change that your user is requesting. Fight this.
The team as an entity needs to communicate clearly with the rest of the world.
People look forward to meetings with them, because they know that they'll see a well-prepared performance that makes everyone feel good.
There is a simple marketing trick that helps teams communicate as one: generate a brand.
Appoint a member as the project librarian.
It is a mistake to think that the activities of a project—analysis, design, coding, and testing—can happen in isolation. They can't. These are different views of the same problem, and artificially separating them can cause a boatload of trouble.
Tip 60: Organize Around Functionality, Not Job Functions
Organize our resources using the same techniques we use to organize code, using techniques such as contracts (Design by Contract), decoupling (Decoupling and the Law of Demeter), and orthogonality (Orthogonality), and we help isolate the team as a whole from the effects of change.
Automation is an essential component of every project team
Tip 61: Don't Use Manual Procedures
Using cron, we can schedule backups, nightly build, Web site... unattended, automatically.
We want to check out, build, test, and ship with a single command
A build is a procedure that takes an empty directory (and a known compilation environment) and builds the project from scratch, producing whatever you hope to produce as a final deliverable.
When you don't run tests regularly, you may discover that the application broke due to a code change made three months ago. Good luck finding that one.
Nightly build run it every night.
Final builds (to ship as products), may have different requirements from the regular nightly build.
Our goal is to maintain an automatic, unattended, content-driven workflow.
Let the computer do the repetitious, the mundane—it will do a better job of it than we would. We've got more important and more difficult things to do.
Pragmatic Programmers are driven to find our bugs now, so we don't have to endure the shame of others finding our bugs later.
Tip 62: Test Early. Test Often. Test Automatically.
Tests that run with every build are the most effective.
The earlier a bug is found, the cheaper it is to remedy. "Code a little, test a little".
Tip 63: Coding Ain't Done til All the Tests Run
Tip 64: Use Saboteurs to Test Your Testing
Tip 65: Test State Coverage, Not Code Coverage
As soon as any production code exists, it needs to be tested. Most testing should be done automatically.
If a bug slips through the net of existing tests, you need to add a new test to trap it next time.
Tip 66: Find Bugs Once
If there's a discrepancy, the code is what matters—for better or worse.
Tip 67: Treat English as Just Another Programming Language
Tip 68: Build Documentation In, Don't Bolt It On
In general, comments should discuss why something is done, its purpose and its goal.
Remember that you (and others after you) will be reading the code many hundreds of times, but only writing it a few times.
Even worse than meaningless names are misleading names.
One of the most important pieces of information that should appear in the source file is the author's name—not necessarily who edited the file last, but the owner.
Create documents that create schemas. The only way to change the schema is to change the document.
We want the writers to embrace the same basic principles that a Pragmatic Programmer does—especially honoring the DRY principle, orthogonality, the model-view concept, and the use of automation and scripting.
Paper documentation can become out of date as soon as it's printed.
Publish it online, on the Web.
Remember to put a date stamp or version number on each Web page.
Using a markup system, you have the flexibility to implement as many different output formats as you need.
Documentation and code are different views of the same underlying model, but the view is all that should be different.
The success of a project is measured by how well it meets the expectations of its users.
Tip 69: Gently Exceed Your Users' Expectations
Users initially come to you with some vision of what they want. You cannot just ignore it.
Everyone should understand what's expected and how it will be built.
Give users that little bit more than they were expecting.
Pragmatic Programmers don't shirk from responsibility. Instead, we rejoice in accepting challenges and in making our expertise well known.
We want to see pride of ownership. "I wrote this, and I stand behind my work."
Tip 70: Sign Your Work
Tip 1: Care About Your Craft Why spend your life developing software unless you care about doing it well?
Tip 2: Think! About Your Work Turn off the autopilot and take control. Constantly critique and appraise your work.
Tip 3: Provide Options, Don't Make Lame Excuses Instead of excuses, provide options. Don't say it can't be done; explain what can be done.
Tip 4: Don't Live with Broken Windows Fix bad designs, wrong decisions, and poor code when you see them.
Tip 5: Be a Catalyst for Change You can't force change on people. Instead, show them how the future might be and help them participate in creating it.
Tip 6: Remember the Big Picture Don't get so engrossed in the details that you forget to check what's happening around you.
Tip 7: Make Quality a Requirements Issue Involve your users in determining the project's real quality requirements.
Tip 8: Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio Make learning a habit.
Tip 9: Critically Analyze What You Read and Hear Don't be swayed by vendors, media hype, or dogma. Analyze information in terms of you and your project.
Tip 10: It's Both What You Say and the Way You Say It There's no point in having great ideas if you don't communicate them effectively.
Tip 11: DRY – Don't Repeat Yourself Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.
Tip 12: Make It Easy to Reuse If it's easy to reuse, people will. Create an environment that supports reuse.
Tip 13: Eliminate Effects Between Unrelated Things Design components that are self-contained, independent, and have a single, well-defined purpose.
Tip 14: There Are No Final Decisions No decision is cast in stone. Instead, consider each as being written in the sand at the beach, and plan for change.
Tip 15: Use Tracer Bullets to Find the Target Tracer bullets let you home in on your target by trying things and seeing how close they land.
Tip 12: Prototype to Learn Prototyping is a learning experience. Its value lies not in the code you produce, but in the lessons you learn.
Tip 17: Program Close to the Problem Domain Design and code in your user's language.
Tip 18: Estimate to Avoid Surprises Estimate before you start. You'll spot potential problems up front.
Tip 19: Iterate the Schedule with the Code Use experience you gain as you implement to refine the project time scales.
Tip 20: Keep Knowledge in Plain Text Plain text won't become obsolete. It helps leverage your work and simplifies debugging and testing.
Tip 21: Use the Power of Command Shells Use the shell when graphical user interfaces don't cut it.
Tip 22: Use a Single Editor Well The editor should be an extension of your hand; make sure your editor is configurable, extensible, and programmable.
Tip 23: Always Use Source Code Control Source code control is a time machine for your work – you can go back.
Tip 24: Fix the Problem, Not the Blame It doesn't really matter whether the bug is your fault or someone else's – it is still your problem, and it still needs to be fixed.
Tip 25: Don't Panic When Debugging Take a deep breath and THINK! about what could be causing the bug.
Tip 26: "select" Isn't Broken. It is rare to find a bug in the OS or the compiler, or even a third-party product or library. The bug is most likely in the application.
Tip 27: Don't Assume It – Prove It Prove your assumptions in the actual environment – with real data and boundary conditions.
Tip 28: Learn a Text Manipulation Language. You spend a large part of each day working with text. Why not have the computer do some of it for you?
Tip 29: Write Code That Writes Code Code generators increase your productivity and help avoid duplication.
Tip 30: You Can't Write Perfect Software Software can't be perfect. Protect your code and users from the inevitable errors.
Tip 31: Design with Contracts Use contracts to document and verify that code does no more and no less than it claims to do.
Tip 32: Crash Early A dead program normally does a lot less damage than a crippled one.
Tip 33: Use Assertions to Prevent the Impossible Assertions validate your assumptions. Use them to protect your code from an uncertain world.
Tip 34: Use Exceptions for Exceptional Problems Exceptions can suffer from all the readability and maintainability problems of classic spaghetti code. Reserve exceptions for exceptional things.
Tip 35: Finish What You Start Where possible, the routine or object that allocates a resource should be responsible for deallocating it.
Tip 36: Minimize Coupling Between Modules Avoid coupling by writing "shy" code and applying the Law of Demeter.
Tip 37: Configure, Don't Integrate Implement technology choices for an application as configuration options, not through integration or engineering.
Tip 38: Put Abstractions in Code, Details in Metadata Program for the general case, and put the specifics outside the compiled code base.
Tip 39: Analyze Workflow to Improve Concurrency Exploit concurrency in your user's workflow.
Tip 40: Design Using Services Design in terms of services – independent, concurrent objects behind well-defined, consistent interfaces.
Tip 41: Always Design for Concurrency Allow for concurrency, and you'll design cleaner interfaces with fewer assumptions.
Tip 42: Separate Views from Models Gain flexibility at low cost by designing your application in terms of models and views.
Tip 43: Use Blackboards to Coordinate Workflow Use blackboards to coordinate disparate facts and agents, while maintaining independence and isolation among participants.
Tip 44: Don't Program by Coincidence Rely only on reliable things. Beware of accidental complexity, and don't confuse a happy coincidence with a purposeful plan.
Tip 45: Estimate the Order of Your Algorithms Get a feel for how long things are likely to take before you write code.
Tip 46: Test Your Estimates Mathematical analysis of algorithms doesn't tell you everything. Try timing your code in its target environment.
Tip 47: Refactor Early, Refactor Often Just as you might weed and rearrange a garden, rewrite, rework, and re-architect code when it needs it. Fix the root of the problem.
Tip 48: Design to Test Start thinking about testing before you write a line of code.
Tip 49: Test Your Software, or Your Users Will Test ruthlessly. Don't make your users find bugs for you.
Tip 50: Don't Use Wizard Code You Don't Understand Wizards can generate reams of code. Make sure you understand all of it before you incorporate it into your project.
Tip 51: Don't Gather Requirements – Dig for Them Requirements rarely lie on the surface. They're buried deep beneath layers of assumptions, misconceptions, and politics.
Tip 52: Work With a User to Think Like a User It's the best way to gain insight into how the system will really be used.
Tip 53: Abstractions Live Longer than Details Invest in the abstraction, not the implementation. Abstractions can survive the barrage of changes from different implementations and new technologies.
Tip 54: Use a Project Glossary Create and maintain a single source of all the specific terms and vocabulary for a project.
Tip 55: Don't Think Outside the Box – Find the Box When faced with an impossible problem, identify the real constraints. Ask yourself: "Does it have to be done this way? Does it have to be done at all?"
Tip 56: Start When You're Ready. You've been building experience all your life. Don't ignore niggling doubts.
Tip 57: Some Things Are Better Done than Described Don't fall into the specification spiral – at some point you need to start coding.
Tip 58: Don't Be a Slave to Formal Methods. Don't blindly adopt any technique without putting it into the context of your development practices and capabilities.
Tip 59: Costly Tools Don't Produce Better Designs Beware of vendor hype, industry dogma, and the aura of the price tag. Judge tools on their merits.
Tip 60: Organize Teams Around Functionality Don't separate designers from coders, testers from data modelers. Build teams the way you build code.
Tip 61: Don't Use Manual Procedures A shell script or batch file will execute the same instructions, in the same order, time after time.
Tip 62: Test Early. Test Often. Test Automatically Tests that run with every build are much more effective than test plans that sit on a shelf.
Tip 63: Coding Ain't Done 'Til All the Tests Run 'Nuff said.
Tip 64: Use Saboteurs to Test Your Testing Introduce bugs on purpose in a separate copy of the source to verify that testing will catch them.
Tip 65: Test State Coverage, Not Code Coverage Identify and test significant program states. Just testing lines of code isn't enough.
Tip 66: Find Bugs Once Once a human tester finds a bug, it should be the last time a human tester finds that bug. Automatic tests should check for it from then on.
Tip 67: English is Just a Programming Language Write documents as you would write code: honor the DRY principle, use metadata, MVC, automatic generation, and so on.
Tip 68: Build Documentation In, Don't Bolt It On Documentation created separately from code is less likely to be correct and up to date.
Tip 69: Gently Exceed Your Users' Expectations Come to understand your users' expectations, then deliver just that little bit more.
Tip 70: Sign Your Work Craftsmen of an earlier age were proud to sign their work. You should be, too.
Tired of C, C++, and Java? Try the following languages. Each of these languages has different capabilities and a different "flavor." Try a small project at home using one or more of them.
An object's method should call only methods belonging to:
When solving impossible problems, ask yourself:
Content from The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. Visit www.pragmaticprogrammer.com. Copyright 2000 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.
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