Overview
Distills into one book many common practices to avoid (which normally comes from several years of experience), thus giving you a checklist of things you shouldn’t do
Explains the fundamentals in a humorous and easy-to-understand way
Sources its information from successful software projects and empirical research
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About this book
This book takes a humorous slant on the programming practice manual by reversing the usual approach: under the pretence of teaching you how to become the world’s worst programmer who generally causes chaos, the book teaches you how to avoid the kind of bad habits that introduce bugs or cause code contributions to be rejected.
Why be a code monkey when you can be a chaos monkey? OK, so you want to become a terrible programmer. You want to write code that gets vigorously rejected in review. You look forward to reading feedback plastered in comments like "WTF???". Even better, you fantasize about your bug-ridden changes sneaking through and causing untold chaos in the codebase. You want to build a reputation as someone who writes creaky, messy, error-prone garbage that frustrates your colleagues. Bad Programming Practices 101 will help you achieve that goal a whole lot quicker by teaching you an array of bad habits that will allow you to cause maximum chaos.
Alternatively, you could use this book to identify those bad habits and learn to avoid them. The bad practices are organized into topics that form the basis of programming (layout, variables, loops, modules, and so on). It's been remarked that to become a good programmer, you must first write 10,000 lines of bad code to get it all out of your system. This book is aimed at programmers who have so far written only a small portion of that. By learning about poor programming habits, you will learn good practices. In addition, you will find out the motivation behind each practice, so you can learn why it is considered good and not simply get a list of rules.
What You'll Learn
Who This Book Is For
Those who have some practical programming knowledge (can program in at least one programming language), but little or no professional experience, which they would like to quickly build up. They are either still undergoing training in software development, or are at the beginning of their programming career. They have at most 1-2 years of professional experience.
Why be a code monkey when you can be a chaos monkey? OK, so you want to become a terrible programmer. You want to write code that gets vigorously rejected in review. You look forward to reading feedback plastered in comments like "WTF???". Even better, you fantasize about your bug-ridden changes sneaking through and causing untold chaos in the codebase. You want to build a reputation as someone who writes creaky, messy, error-prone garbage that frustrates your colleagues. Bad Programming Practices 101 will help you achieve that goal a whole lot quicker by teaching you an array of bad habits that will allow you to cause maximum chaos.
Alternatively, you could use this book to identify those bad habits and learn to avoid them. The bad practices are organized into topics that form the basis of programming (layout, variables, loops, modules, and so on). It's been remarked that to become a good programmer, you must first write 10,000 lines of bad code to get it all out of your system. This book is aimed at programmers who have so far written only a small portion of that. By learning about poor programming habits, you will learn good practices. In addition, you will find out the motivation behind each practice, so you can learn why it is considered good and not simply get a list of rules.
What You'll Learn
- Become a better coder by learning how (not) to program
- Choose your tools wisely
- Think of programming as problem solving
- Discover the consequences of a program’s appearance and overall structure
- Explain poor use of variables in programs
- Avoid bad habits and common mistakes when using conditionals and loops
- See how poor error-handling makes for unstable programs
- Sidestep bad practices related specifically to object-oriented programming
- Mitigate the effects of ineffectual and inadequate bug location and testing
Who This Book Is For
Those who have some practical programming knowledge (can program in at least one programming language), but little or no professional experience, which they would like to quickly build up. They are either still undergoing training in software development, or are at the beginning of their programming career. They have at most 1-2 years of professional experience.
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Keywords
Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Beecher focuses on poor coding practices that frequently creep into programmers' code. He crams 11 chapters of well-illustrated, well-documented examples of bad programming practices into just over 200 pages. … The book has a well-constructed index and an excellent bibliography. Readers are urged to use the bibliography to review and reacquaint themselves with many excellent traditional references. … Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.” (J. Beidler, Choice, Vol. 56 (03), November, 2018)
“I liked the book in a way that it was written as a comic book, which was easy to read. Some programming traps were well-described. The book is written in Java, but the code snippets are understandable for anyone, who is programming.” (Vitosh, vitoshacademy.com, June, 2018)
“I liked the book in a way that it was written as a comic book, which was easy to read. Some programming traps were well-described. The book is written in Java, but the code snippets are understandable for anyone, who is programming.” (Vitosh, vitoshacademy.com, June, 2018)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Karl Beecher is a British writer, software developer and teacher based in Berlin, Germany. He specializes in taking meaty, complex ideas and presenting them in ways that are easy to understand.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Bad Programming Practices 101
Book Subtitle: Become a Better Coder by Learning How (Not) to Program
Authors: Karl Beecher
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3411-2
Publisher: Apress Berkeley, CA
eBook Packages: Professional and Applied Computing, Professional and Applied Computing (R0), Apress Access Books
Copyright Information: Karl Beecher 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4842-3410-5Published: 09 February 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4842-3411-2Published: 08 February 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXII, 221
Number of Illustrations: 15 illustrations in colour
Topics: Programming Techniques, Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Compilers, Interpreters