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

The Up-To-Dateness Problem

The other primary complaint about creating documentation other than source code is that, unless the docs are maintained alongside the source, they'll quickly go out of date; that reading documentation that's obsolete is worse than reading no documentation; and that effort that doesn't go into working code is effort wasted.

I'll address the second point first. The point of producing any form of developer documentation is to make it easier for developers to work with the software. Therefore, the cost of creating the documentation should really be weighed against the opportunity cost of not producing it. If the effort saved by letting developers get straight on with their work is greater than the time spent creating and maintaining the documentation, then it's worth doing. Conversely, if the trade-off doesn't work out, you need to decide whether to give up on that form of documentation for something more valuable or find a quicker way...