Preface

What's this book all about? Well, it's about how to develop software, from a personal perspective. We'll look at what it means for you to take a problem and produce a program to solve it from beginning to end. That said, this book focuses a lot on design. How do you design software? What things do you take into account? What makes a good design? What methods and processes are there to designing software? Is designing small programs different from designing large ones? How can you tell a good design from a bad one?

Next, it's about code construction. How do you write programs and make them work? “What,” you say? “I've already written eight gazillion programs! Of course I know how to write code!” Well, in this book, we'll explore what you already do, and we'll investigate ways to improve on that. We'll spend some time on coding standards, debugging, unit testing, modularity, and characteristics of good programs. We'll also talk about reading code and what makes a program readable. Can good, readable code replace documentation? How much documentation do you really need?