Best practices, structuring of code, dissecting algorithms and talking about the “Why?”
Every programmer comes across a point in their career where they think nothing will surprise them or fundamentally change the way they think about code. Every programmer would be wrong. Many programmers often run into these "inflection points" multiple times over the years. One such point came to me while reading the book Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. The book discussed a few topics involving function ...
So you want to build a PHP game and are just now learning how to do it. You fired up your browser and began searching for various game articles and perhaps you have found very little. What you did find might not explain a flexible way to apply magical spells to units you create. After all, what is an RPG game without enchantments you can cast on your (or enemy's) ...
Today I give my take on a blog article I stumbled across today called "Computer Algorithms: Linear Search in Sorted Lists" which gives a look at applying the linear search model to something sorted. I will offer a suggestion to perhaps make this a bit better for implementation and perhaps performance reasons. So buckle up and we will take another spin around the Programming Underground! Ok, so if you are a ...
Hello once again! Today I want to talk to you about a design decision which involves validating data. Often times newbies build error prone code. This is because they are just learning and lack the experience of proper validation... and lack the experience of being smacked in the face when the code fails on the input of "a" when an integer is expected. As we become more experienced we learn ...
Once in awhile you may want to check if a file has changed its contents in some way. Perhaps you are monitoring a log file or checking to see if an exe has had a virus mess with it. One way you could do this is by hooking up a FileSystemWatcher object and monitor the file. This might be a good approach for more elaborate programs where you also want ...
Hello everyone! The other day I was approached by macosxnerd101, a newly minted moderator at Dream.In.Code, and asked to contribute to a new thread coming up on Java data structures. Now most of the new programmers here know of the basic data structures like binary trees, arrays, heaps or stacks. Many of these topics I knew would be covered by other contributors to the thread. So I decided to introduce ...