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.

A good programmer not only writes code but also incorporates routines, tricks, and attitudes into his day-to-day life that allow him to be more productive, more creative, and an even better professional. Repeat and assume them as something natural until they become habits and, only then, you will go to the next level. The only thing that distinguishes a good professional from another in the crowd are their habits. It is not necessary to work many more hours, but to do it with more efficiency, productivity and more concentration. Do not generate software with so many bugs but rather develop better with good design and clean code practices. Adopt the necessary 'soft-skills' for a programmer. Nor it is necessary to exert yourself to exhaustion, but to really assume the habits of an expert and more valued programmer. And so on until you complete the thirty-nine pills of wisdom described in this book that will take you several steps beyond your career. By the author of The Black Book of the Programmer.

For graduate students in the social and health sciences, featuring essential concepts and equations most often needed in scholarly publications. Uses excerpts from the scholarly literature in these fields to introduce new concepts. Uses publicly-available data that are regularly used in social and health science publications to introduce Stata code and illustrate concepts and interpretation. Thoroughly integrates the teaching of statistical theory with teaching data processing and analysis. Offers guidance about planning projects and organizing code for reproducibility Shows how to recognize critiques of the constructions, terminology, and interpretations of statistics. New edition focuses on Stata, with code integrated into the chapters (rather than appendices, as in the first edition) includes Stata’s factor variables and margins commands and Long and Freese’s (2014) spost13 commands, to simplify programming and facilitate interpretation.

This book takes a humorous slant on the programming practice manual by reversing the usual approach: under the pretence of teaching you how to become the world's worst programmer who generally causes chaos, the book teaches you how to avoid the kind of bad habits that introduce bugs or cause code contributions to be rejected. Why be a code monkey when you can be a chaos monkey? OK, so you want to become a terrible programmer. You want to write code that gets vigorously rejected in review. You look forward to reading feedback plastered in comments like "WTF???". Even better, you fantasize about your bug-ridden changes sneaking through and causing untold chaos in the codebase. You want to build a reputation as someone who writes creaky, messy, error-prone garbage that frustrates your colleagues. Bad Programming Practices 101 will help you achieve that goal a whole lot quicker by teaching you an array of bad habits that will allow you to cause maximum chaos. Alternatively, you could use this book to identify those bad habits and learn to avoid them. The bad practices are organised into topics that form the basis of programming (layout, variables, loops, modules, and so on). It's been remarked that to become a good programmer, you must first write 10,000 lines of bad code to get it all out of your system. This book is aimed at programmers who have so far written only a small portion of that. By learning about poor programming habits, you will learn good practices. In addition, you will find out the motivation behind each practice, so you can learn why it is considered good and not simply get a list of rules. You will: Become a better coder by learning how (not) to program Choose your tools wisely Think of programming as problem solving Discover the consequences of a program's appearance and overall structure Explain poor use of variables in programs Avoid bad habits and common mistakes when using conditionals and loops See how poor error-handling makes for unstable programs Sidestep bad practices related specifically to object-oriented programming Mitigate the effects of ineffectual and inadequate bug location and testing.

Utilize proven solutions to solve common problems in game development About This Book Untangle your game development workflow, make cleaner code, and create structurally solid games Implement key programming patterns that will enable you to make efficient AI and remove duplication Optimize your game using memory management techniques Who This Book Is For If you are a game developer who wants to solve commonly-encountered issues or have some way to communicate to other developers in a standardized format, then this book is for you. Knowledge of basic game programming principles and C++ programming is assumed. What You Will Learn Learn what design patterns are and why you would want to use them Reduce the maintenance burden with well-tested, cleaner code Employ the singleton pattern effectively to reduce your compiler workload Use the factory pattern to help you create different objects with the same creation logic and reduce coding time Improve game performance with Object Pools Allow game play to interact with physics or graphics in an abstract way Refractor your code to remove common code smells In Detail You've learned how to program, and you've probably created some simple games at some point, but now you want to build larger projects and find out how to resolve your problems. So instead of a coder, you might now want to think like a game developer or software engineer. To organize your code well, you need certain tools to do so, and that's what this book is all about. You will learn techniques to code quickly and correctly, while ensuring your code is modular and easily understandable. To begin, we will start with the core game programming patterns, but not the usual way. We will take the use case strategy with this book. We will take an AAA standard game and show you the hurdles at multiple stages of development. Similarly, various use cases are used to showcase other patterns such as the adapter pattern, prototype pattern, flyweight pattern, and observer pattern. Lastly, we'll go over some tips and tricks on how to refactor your code to remove common code smells and make it easier for others to work with you. By the end of the book you will be proficient in using the most popular and frequently used patterns with the best practices. Style and approach This book takes a step-by-step real-life case studies approach. Every pattern is first explained using a bottleneck. We will show you a problem in your everyday workflow, and then introduce you to the pattern, and show you how the pattern will resolve the situation.

A good programmer not only writes code but also incorporates routines, tricks, and attitudes into his day-to-day life that allow him to be more productive, more creative, and an even better professional.Repeat and assume them as something natural until they become habits and, only then, you will go to the next level.The only thing that distinguishes a good professional from another in the crowd are their habits.It is not necessary to work many more hours, but to do it with more efficiency, productivity and more concentration. Do not generate software with so many bugs but rather develop better with good design and clean code practices. Adopt the necessary 'soft-skills' for a programmer. Nor it is necessary to exert yourself to exhaustion, but to really assume the habits of an expert and more valued programmer. And so on until you complete the thirty-nine pills of wisdom described in this book that will take you several steps beyond your career.By the author of The Black Book of the Programmer.

Consistent, high-quality coding standards improve software quality, reduce time-to-market, promote teamwork, eliminate time wasted on inconsequential matters, and simplify maintenance. Now, two of the world's most respected C++ experts distill the rich collective experience of the global C++ community into a set of coding standards that every developer and development team can understand and use as a basis for their own coding standards. The authors cover virtually every facet of C++ programming: design and coding style, functions, operators, class design, inheritance, construction/destruction, copying, assignment, namespaces, modules, templates, genericity, exceptions, STL containers and algorithms, and more. Each standard is described concisely, with practical examples. From type definition to error handling, this book presents C++ best practices, including some that have only recently been identified and standardized-techniques you may not know even if you've used C++ for years. Along the way, you'll find answers to questions like What's worth standardizing--and what isn't? What are the best ways to code for scalability? What are the elements of a rational error handling policy? How (and why) do you avoid unnecessary initialization, cyclic, and definitional dependencies? When (and how) should you use static and dynamic polymorphism together? How do you practice "safe" overriding? When should you provide a no-fail swap? Why and how should you prevent exceptions from propagating across module boundaries? Why shouldn't you write namespace declarations or directives in a header file? Why should you use STL vector and string instead of arrays? How do you choose the right STL search or sort algorithm? What rules should you follow to ensure type-safe code? Whether you're working alone or with others, C++ Coding Standards will help you write cleaner code--and write it faster, with fewer hassles and less frustration.