Tap into the wisdom of experts to learn what every programmer should know, no matter what language you use. With the 97 short and extremely useful tips for programmers in this book, you'll expand your skills by adopting new approaches to old problems, learning appropriate best practices, and honing your craft through sound advice.

With contributions from some of the most experienced and respected practitioners in the industry--including Michael Feathers, Pete Goodliffe, Diomidis Spinellis, Cay Horstmann, Verity Stob, and many more--this book contains practical knowledge and principles that you can apply to all kinds of projects.

A few of the 97 things you should know:

• "Code in the Language of the Domain" by Dan North
• "Write Tests for People" by Gerard Meszaros
• "Convenience Is Not an -ility" by Gregor Hohpe
• "Know Your IDE" by Heinz Kabutz
• "A Message to the Future" by Linda Rising
• "The Boy Scout Rule" by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)
• "Beware the Share" by Udi Dahan

Table of Contents

1. Act with Prudence
2. Apply Functional Programming Principles
3. Ask, "What Would the User Do?" (You Are Not the User)
4. Automate Your Coding Standard
5. Beauty Is in Simplicity
6. Before You Refactor
7. Beware the Share
8. The Boy Scout Rule
9. Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others
10. Choose Your Tools with Care
11. Code in the Language of the Domain
12. Code Is Design
13. Code Layout Matters
14. Code Reviews
15. Coding with Reason
16. A Comment on Comments
17. Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say
18. Continuous Learning
19. Convenience Is Not an -ility
20. Deploy Early and Often
21. Distinguish Business Exceptions from Technical
22. Do Lots of Deliberate Practice
23. Domain-Specific Languages
24. Don't Be Afraid to Break Things
25. Don't Be Cute with Your Test Data
26. Don't Ignore That Error!
27. Don't Just Learn the Language, Understand Its Culture
28. Don't Nail Your Program into the Upright Position
29. Don't Rely on "Magic Happens Here"
30. Don't Repeat Yourself
31. Don't Touch That Code!
32. Encapsulate Behavior, Not Just State
33. Floating-Point Numbers Aren't Real
34. Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source
35. The Golden Rule of API Design
36. The Guru Myth
37. Hard Work Does Not Pay Off
38. How to Use a Bug Tracker
39. Improve Code by Removing It
40. Install Me
41. Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time
42. Keep the Build Clean
43. Know How to Use Command-Line Tools
44. Know Well More Than Two Programming Languages
45. Know Your IDE
46. Know Your Limits
47. Know Your Next Commit
48. Large, Interconnected Data Belongs to a Database
49. Learn Foreign Languages
50. Learn to Estimate
51. Learn to Say, "Hello, World"
52. Let Your Project Speak for Itself
53. The Linker Is Not a Magical Program
54. The Longevity of Interim Solutions
55. Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly
56. Make the Invisible More Visible
57. Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems
58. A Message to the Future
59. Missing Opportunities for Polymorphism
60. News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends
61. One Binary
62. Only the Code Tells the Truth
63. Own (and Refactor) the Build
64. Pair Program and Feel the Flow
65. Prefer Domain-Specific Types to Primitive Types
66. Prevent Errors
67. The Professional Programmer
68. Put Everything Under Version Control
69. Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard
70. Read Code
71. Read the Humanities
72. Reinvent the Wheel Often
73. Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern
74. The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs
75. Simplicity Comes from Reduction
76. The Single Responsibility Principle
77. Start from Yes
78. Step Back and Automate, Automate, Automate
79. Take Advantage of Code Analysis Tools
80. Test for Required Behavior, Not Incidental Behavior
81. Test Precisely and Concretely
82. Test While You Sleep (and over Weekends)
83. Testing Is the Engineering Rigor of Software Development
84. Thinking in States
85. Two Heads Are Often Better Than One
86. Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix)
87. Ubuntu Coding for Your Friends
88. The Unix Tools Are Your Friends
89. Use the Right Algorithm and Data Structure
90. Verbose Logging Will Disturb Your Sleep
91. WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks
92. When Programmers and Testers Collaborate
93. Write Code As If You Had to Support It for the Rest of Your Life
94. Write Small Functions Using Examples
95. Write Tests for People
96. You Gotta Care About the Code
97. Your Customers Do Not Mean What They Say

About the Author

Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant and trainer. His work focuses on patterns and architecture, programming techniques and languages, and development process and practice. He has been a columnist for various magazines and online publications, including The Register, Better Software, Java Report, CUJ, and C++ Report. Kevlin is co-author of two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series: A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages. He also contributed to 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know