This maybe be sufficient for deliver one or two assignments but is far from been what is used in “real life” for delivering successful projects. Imagine that the project that need to be delivered to your client is about 100.000 lines of code organized in 5.000 files and you are working at it with 5 colleagues that have all different experiences and background. Do you think that a text editor will be sufficient for handling this complexity?

The answer is: it is simply impossible. This is the reason why disciplines like software engineering exist and offer some of the most payed jobs to its practitioners. You probably start learning to program writing procedures, or sequence of actions that the computer should perform for you. However, “real life projects” use Object Oriented Programming (OOP) as basic framework for ensuring that the code can be read and maintained by large groups of developers.

You may be not interested in learning the intricate details of software development. However, some of the tools that a software engineer use may simplify your life and facilitate the development of the “few lines of code” that you have do deliver. This is the case of what is called Integrated Development Environment or IDE in short. You can consider this as a collection of tools that are used for facilitating the development of code.

Normally each language has his own IDE. For example, if you are a JAVA developer you will probably use Eclipse. If you are a Python developer interest in data science related project you will probably consider Anaconda.

Your university may not actively promote the use of an IDE for several reasons. Some of the includes:

• The automation fostered by this approach will bring you “far from the metal” and will not let you appreciate how things works.
• The learning curve is too slow. In other words, you will spend more time learning the details of an IDE instead of learning the topics of the course.
• Text based programming will help you developing a good set of habits.

However, independently of the reasons for not using an IDE my suggestion is to try to familiarize with one. If not for your classes, you may want to consider using it for your thesis. You can consider the initial time that you will spend learning the tool(s) as an investment that will pay off during your thesis.

If you like this idea you can find in these articles you can find a few tips and suggestions on how to set up your IDE for particular projects:

• IDE for Python in data science related projects
• IDE of JAVA for Distributed Applications and Service Oriented Architecture

In case you are not familiar with OOP, you may find this article useful for familiarize with the concepts:

• The basic of Object Oriented Programming

The use of a proper Integrated Development Environment ( #IDE ) will help you in becoming a #programmer that is familiar with Object Oriented #programming
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Object-Oriented Programming has permeated almost every facet of modern software development. Its principles and concepts are applied in diverse domains, from software architecture and frameworks to user interfaces, game development, real-time systems, and beyond. OOP’s ability to enhance code organization, reusability, and maintainability has solidified its role as a foundational approach in the creation of complex and reliable software systems.

OOP leverage the concept of Classes and Objects and the following 4 paradigms:

• Abstraction: a process where you show only “relevant” data and “hide” unnecessary details of an object from the user.
• Encapsulation: a practice that bind the data with the code that manipulates it and keeps the data and the code safe from external interference
• Inheritance: the mechanism by which an object acquires the some (or all) properties of another object.
• Polymorphism: a way to process objects differently based on their data type. In other words objects can have the same name for a method but the implementation may differ.

If you are not familiar with these concepts I would recommend you to watch the following video that explains what is object oriented programming in a few minutes.

If you are familiar with Python and you want to see how these things work in practice I would recommend to follow the instructions in this video that explains how to create Python Classes using the Spyder IDE:

In the case you do not know what is an Integrated Developing Environment (IDE) this article will give you the basic and explains why you need an IDE.

If you put attention to the way the author of the video is writing the code you would probably notice that is following a certain naming convention. Some of these conventions are imposed by the compiler and there is no work around that. Other are best practices that will improve the readability of your code. As the majority of the example that you can find in internet follow these conventions I would recommend you to get familiar with the basic as you will save a lot of time in the long run.

This video introduce the basic (and most popularly accepted) conventions in JAVA. Python follow something similar as well:

More resources on naming conventions include:

• Camel Case in Wikipedia
• Naming Convention on Programming

Clearly this is just the tip of the iceberg of Object Oriented Programming. If you want to know more you could follow this class of MIT OpenCourseWare that should set a more concrete foundation if you are not familiar with the concept at all.

Get the basic of Object Oriented #programming and build better #Software . Practical examples in #Java and #python . #softwaredevelopment #SoftwareEngineer
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A few more resources that can help you grasping the context surround OOP include the following:

• Object Oriented Programming in Wikipedia
• Software Engineering in Wikipedia

The post Object Oriented Programming: A curated set of resources appeared first on Francesco Lelli.