

You’ll see syntax coloring in the examples in this book.
#Mac art programs code
It makes your code much easier for yourself and others to read in a number of ways: by helping with indentation and formatting, by letting you set markers in your code (so you can easily return to something you are working on), by helping you match up your parentheses, and most important by syntax coloring (coloring different parts of your code with different colors according to their meanings in the program). A good text editor can help catch many of those “stupid mistakes” that beginner programmers make.oh, alright, that all programmers make. While there’s pretty much just one Ruby interpreter and one command line, there are many text editors to choose from-and some are much better for programming than others. We’ll be using three main tools when we program: a text editor (to write your programs), the Ruby interpreter (to run your programs), and your command line (which is how you tell your computer which programs you want to run). (But not just any laziness: you must be aggressively, proactively lazy!) Save yourself work whenever possible. I usually think of it in another way: a good programmer cultivates the virtue of laziness. This is sometimes called the DRY rule: Don’t Repeat Yourself. Probably the first, most basic rule of good programming is to avoid duplication of code at all costs. I know it’s not really clear yet what this means in practical terms, but I’ll be bringing it up throughout the book.

They are talked about, sketched out, prototyped, played with, refactored, tuned, tested, tweaked, deleted, rewritten.īecause a program is always growing and always changing, it must be written with change in mind.

Programs aren’t just built in one go, like a bridge. (Anyway, an ugly process will result in buggy code. Programming is not just about the end product it’s about the process that gets you there. However, focusing on correctness, on bug-free programs, misses a lot of what programming is all about. (My first program was not in Ruby, which is another reason why it was so painful.) The Art of ProgrammingĪn important part of programming is, of course, making a program that does what it’s supposed to do. You need all that just to do nothing, just to say, “Hey, I am a Java program, and I don’t do anything!” So that’s why we’ll use Ruby. How about this comparison: I’ll write a program to do nothing! Nothing at all! In Ruby, you don’t need to write anything at all a completely blank program will work just fine. Passing Blocks (Not Procs) into Methods.
