Last updated: Dec 13, 23 17:42 UTC | Permalink

3 - Best Practices for Effective Programmers

Learning Objectives:

This lecture is about writing code that other people will be able to understand, reuse, and modify. We’ve distilled this down to five general program-design princples which should be best practices for effective programmers:

• Use Good Names
• Make Your Data Mean Something
• One Method/One Job
• Don’t Repeat Yourself
• Don’t Hardcode Things That Are Likely To Change

By the end of this lesson you should be able to:

• Describe the purpose of our design principles
• List 5 Best Practices for Effective Programmers with examples
• Identify some violations of the principles and suggest ways to mitigate them

Important Dates:

• Individual Project Deliverable 1 Due Wednesday, Sep 20 by 11am

Lecture Slides:

• Best Practices for Effective Programmers Slides PDF, PPT

Activities:

• Traffic Light Activity: (Handout) (Starter Code)

Resources

• Code Examples from Lecture (zip file)