Book Image

Modern Programming: Object Oriented Programming and Best Practices

By : Graham Lee
Book Image

Modern Programming: Object Oriented Programming and Best Practices

By: Graham Lee

Overview of this book

Your experience and knowledge always influence the approach you take and the tools you use to write your programs. With a sound understanding of how to approach your goal and what software paradigms to use, you can create high-performing applications quickly and efficiently. In this two-part book, you’ll discover the untapped features of object-oriented programming and use it with other software tools to code fast and efficient applications. The first part of the book begins with a discussion on how OOP is used today and moves on to analyze the ideas and problems that OOP doesn’t address. It continues by deconstructing the complexity of OOP, showing you its fundamentally simple core. You’ll see that, by using the distinctive elements of OOP, you can learn to build your applications more easily. The next part of this book talks about acquiring the skills to become a better programmer. You’ll get an overview of how various tools, such as version control and build management, help make your life easier. This book also discusses the pros and cons of other programming paradigms, such as aspect-oriented programming and functional programming, and helps to select the correct approach for your projects. It ends by talking about the philosophy behind designing software and what it means to be a "good" developer. By the end of this two-part book, you will have learned that OOP is not always complex, and you will know how you can evolve into a better programmer by learning about ethics, teamwork, and documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part One – OOP The Easy Way
5
Part Two – APPropriate Behavior

Introduction

The amount of documentation produced as part of a software project varies dramatically. Before digging in to when and how it's appropriate to document your code, I'll first define how I'm using the term.

Documentation in the context of this chapter means things that are produced to help other developers understand the software product and code, but that aren't the executable code or any of the other resources that go into the product itself. Comments in the code, not being executable, are part of the documentation. Unit tests, while executable, don't go into the product—they would be documentation, except that I cover automated testing in Chapter 5, Coding Practices. UML diagrams, developer wikis, commit messages, descriptions in bug reports, whiteboard meetings: these all fulfil the goal of explaining to other developers – not to the computer – what the code does, how, and why.

On the other hand, documentation prepared for other stakeholders...