This mini guide is a collection of best practices that should explain you how to be a better programmer. If you followed some classes in programming you probably are familiar with procedural programming, or scripting programming. In other words you know how you can automatize a set of actions in order to boost your productivity and/or execute complex calculations. However, modern software use more sophisticated techniques that enable millions of lines of code to co-exist and run simultaneously in your machine. The article that you will find in this list will let you grasp some of these techniques that you could implement in your daily practice in order to produce better code and thus save time in building a prototype.
In the case you are thinking what language is better to master you may want to start from this article that gives an overview of past, present and future of programming languages.
Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) refers to a set of tools that will facilitate the development of your code. They are specifically designed by programmers for programmers in order to overcome the difficulties of handling large projects, You can know more by:
- Understand what is an IDE and why you need one.
- If you are using python this is how you can install and configure an IDE (Anaconda) in your laptop
- Understand how to use the debug features of your IDE and save time in building your code.
Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
Objects, not procedures and functions, are the basic building blocks of modern software. You can know more by:
- Understand the basic concepts of Object Oriented Programming
- Follow professional best practices for writing and commenting your code. In this way you will be able to understand and maintain code that you wrote in the past without the need to do it from scratch
- If you already know the basic, this is how to design a good Application Programming Interface (API)
If you will integrate these techniques in your daily practices, once you overcome the initial disorientation, you will quickly experience a tremendous increase of efficiency and you will never want to go back to the “old way” of programming. Thus you will become a better programmer!
Clean Code, Clean Architecture Clean Software
Write code is not just about programming but also how to integrate evolve, maintain, reuse and design software that can be usable by you, your colleagues and your clients. Here you will find a collection of resources that can help you in sharping your programming skills:
- A collection of talks from Uncle Bob introduces a set of best practices for programmers and managers as well as popular software methodologies.
- Understanding how to design a good Application Programming Interface (API) will give you the basic for achieving proper reusable and flexible system integration.
Bonus (free stuff):
Writing code is also about tools, infrastructures and support for your growing. If you are a student there are a lot of resources that can help you for free.
