How to be a Programmer

Martin L. Smith writes "Rob Read has posted his magnum opus, "How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive and Personal Summary" to Samizdat Press where it can be scarfed by the masses. Rob's book is a forty-page tour through the million-and-one things he thinks a programmer ought to know as he sets out into deep water. One of the reasons he posted this was to get some feedback, so tell him what you think. Samizdat Press is maintained by the Colorado School of Mines to provide a distribution point for free (mostly earth-sciences related) texts."

Comments

performance and quality of code

[KIngo]

I thinks his comments on dealing with performance problems are especially helpful, even for experienced programmers. Most decent programmers know how to debug, but few programmers excel in tackling performance problems. I've found that profiling is a very fruitful activity even if there are no obvious performance problems, because it provides tremendous insight into the runtime behavior of your applications. Things are often very different from what you would guess intuitively.

If you happen to work with Java, there are quite a few good commercial profilers around that are really easy to setup and use (such as JProfiler or Optimizeit). Try working with one of these for some time and observe how your way of programming changes for the better. Most importantly, you learn not to pre-emptively "improve" performance - one of the deadliest sins of programming which is responsible for a lot of bad and unreadable code.