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

Prioritizing Work

Most people who make software will have more than one thing they are working on at any time. The choice could be between different tasks on one project, tasks on different projects, and other work such as preparing presentations, responding to emails, and so on.

Some people like to capture all of these tasks in a big review system such as GTD (http://www.davidco.com/) so that, at any time, they can review the outstanding tasks in their current context and choose one to work on next. A much simpler approach I was taught by the human resources department at Sophos (http://www.sophos.com), who got it from President Eisenhower, was to draw four quadrants indicating the urgency and importance of tasks.

Figure 13.1: The Eisenhower Matrix

Now think about the tasks that are currently pending and put them into these quadrants. Anything in the top-right quadrant is both important and urgent, so probably needs to be done soon. Anything that's important but not urgent...