Computer Programming Tips

I present a distillation of everything I have learned in my 12 years programming experience.

First off, if I owned a software development company, I would insist on all my employees reading these two books.

The Pragmatic Programmer

Code Complete

If you want to buy any of these books, by the way, just click on them to go to the Amazon.co.uk page. But be warned, if you make a purchase, Amazon will give me another luxury yacht and a free holiday. You know, I don't want to push the sales thing any further but if you've got anybody who works in software development, these two books sure make nice Christmas presents!

Some clever person once came up with the 80-20 rule. I don't recall who it was but I'm sure someone out there could tell me. He basically said that in most things you do, 80 percent of the results come from 20 percent of the things you do. Well, I believe this applies to programming just as much as anything else. I reckon there are a cluster of magic things you can do which are well and truly in that elusive 20 percent. Here they are...

Represent Information in One Place Only

This rule has a whole chapter devoted to it in The Pragmatic Programmer so I won't go into it too heavily. What this means is that if you have some information, represent it in one place and have everything else refer to it. This way, if that information changes, you only have to update it in one place, not all over the place. This tends to reduce errors. A classic example is the company who stores your details in more than one place, you move house, they update only one of their sources, and you end up getting mail delivered to both addresses. Annoying isn't it.

The HTML code for the headers and footers of most of the pages in this site are represented in one place. If I decide to alter them, I only have to do it in one place and they all change next time I automatically rebuild the site.