Improve your coding skills and learn how to write readable code. Rather than teach basic programming, this book presumes that readers understand the fundamentals, and offers time-honed best practices for style, design, documenting, testing, refactoring, and more.

Taking an informal, conversational tone, author Michael Stueben offers programming stories, anecdotes, observations, advice, tricks, examples, and challenges based on his 38 years experience writing code and teaching programming classes. Trying to teach style to beginners is notoriously difficult and can easily appear pedantic. Instead, this book offers solutions and many examples to back up his ideas.

Good Habits for Great Coding distills Stueben's three decades of analyzing his own mistakes, analyzing student mistakes, searching for problems that teach lessons, and searching for simple examples to illustrate complex ideas. Having found that most learn by trying out challenging problems, and reflecting on them, each chapter includes quizzes and problems. The final chapter introduces dynamic programming to reduce complex problems to subcases, and illustrates many concepts discussed in the book.

Code samples are provided in Python and designed to be understandable by readers familiar with any modern programming language. At the end of this book, you will have acquired a lifetime of good coding advice, the lessons the author wishes he had learned when he was a novice.

What You'll Learn

• Create readable code through examples of good and bad style
• Write difficult algorithms by comparing your code to the author's code
• Derive and code difficult algorithms using dynamic programming
• Understand the psychology of the coding process

Who This Book Is For

Students or novice programmers who have taken a beginning programming course and understand coding basics. Teachers will appreciate the author's road-tested ideas that they may apply to their own teaching.

Table of Contents

Part I: Not Learned in School

Chapter 1: A Coding Fantasy

Chapter 2: Coding Tricks

Chapter 3: Style

Chapter 4: More Coding Tricks

Part II: Coding Advice

Chapter 5: Function Design

Chapter 6: Self-Documenting Code

Chapter 7: Step-Wise Refinement

Chapter 8: Comments

Chapter 9: Stop Coding

Chapter 10: Testing

Chapter 11: Defensive Programming

Chapter 12: Refactoring

Chapter 13: Write the Tests First (Sometimes)

Chapter 14: Expert Advice

Part Ill: Perspective

Chapter 15: A Lesson in Design

Chapter 16: Beware of OOP

Chapter 17: The Evolution of a Function

Chapter 18: Do Not Snub Inefficient Algorithms

Part IV: Walk the Walk

Chapter 19: Problems Worth Solving

Chapter 20: Problem Solving

Chapter 21: Dynamic Programming

About the Author

Michael Stueben started teaching Fortran at Fairfax High School in Virginia in 1977. Eventually the high school computer science curriculum changed from Fortran to BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and finally to Python. In the last five years, Stueben taught artificial intelligence at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, VA. Along the way, he wrote a regular puzzle column for Discover Magazine, published articles in Mathematics Teacher and Mathematics Magazine, published a book on teaching high school mathematics: Twenty Years Before the Blackboard (Mathematical Association of America, 1998). In 2006 he received a Distinguished High School Mathematics Teaching / Edyth May Sliffe Award from the Mathematical Association of America.