Encapsulated Education in Programming. Review on Code Complete - Steve McConnell

This book was a turning point for me as a coder. I am a ways away from those days at this point, but this was a book that was so full of righteous advice and really sound concepts that I couldn't stop. I took notes on the inside cover while I was reading it, and I have gone to it again and again to dig deeper into what it says and how to maintain the quality that you want. Steve delves into the pros and cons of Object Oriented programming at some length. He talks about what drives the decision making process in terms of whether or not to allow OO concepts to drive a project and the software decisions involved in that. The bottom of the discussion where that is concerned is that the data model typically drives the decision to go with an OO platform or not. Also maintainability is a factor, and how much code sharing can be done within the shop in question. He supports code reuse and object libraries. And of course he does, as a Microsoft evangelist, he would definitely want to expound on the glories of the MFC and how it can be utilized for your C++ projects, and so comes a slight bias (maybe not so slight). But that doesn't mean he isn't right. Some of the most interesting things to me conceptually were about regression testing, and unit testing your software.

Steve went on at great length about excellence in the testing phase. There is little that will hurt a project or drive you into some creep than having poor testing standards, or having poor test planning. Probably the most revolutionary information for me was his extensive discussions about design and construction. Steve discusses the differences between using procedures vs. methods or functions - how and why it makes sense to keep the code close to the database. He talks about the bias toward modularity in software construction. He also talks about why that bias makes sense and what good there is in creating modularized software. This leads to a discussion about encapsulation as well. This book goes through each programming construct in incredible detail, loops, if statements, goto, case statements, data structures and design, code layout is covered to the sickening. The two aspects of this that are the best of the best are the endless coding examples.

Steve includes snippets of programs to back up every thing that he says, and while typically ''C'' language examples, the writing is on the wall - anyone who has written any software at all can follow along with what he is saying conceptually. The other part of this book that impressed me very deeply was his references and those that he had read and referenced. Steve turned me on to stoic Thomas Kuhn and ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'', to the absolutely hilarious Alan Cooper and ''The Essentials of User Interface Design'' and to Glenford Meyers ''Composition of Structured Design''....i found a strong sense of history here, and some very intellectual foot work to back up the real world experience. This is a real world book of techniques for those who truly want to learn what it is to program effectively.