This is a review of Chapters 5 and 6 in “The Clean Coder” written by Robert C. Martin.
Chapter 5 is titled Test Driven Development. This is a development process in which you write the unit test first just enough to have it fail then you write just enough code to pass the test. You then go back and write more code then more test until the development process is completed. The author seems to be a large fan of Unit Testing saying that there is really no better way of developing, and anyone who disagrees needs to basically get over it and accept the truth. This was interesting to me because i have learned about unit testing before and from what i understood it isn’t incredibly popular. However i have not currently been in the workforce so i am now 100% sure if this is actually the case. I am actually a fan of TDD, i found it to be very fast paced and at the end you are guaranteed 100percent code coverage of code that you know works, what more could you ask for.
Chapter 6 was especially important to me, the chapter was titled practicing. The author goes on to discuss that any professional no matter what his field spends a good amount of time practicing his craft. He talks about how it is not the duty of a company to allow their employees time to practice, it is the job of the individual, a company is there to spice up your resume and it is practice that makes it so you can be paid well. Practice is something that i agree is very important to becoming a good developer and it is also something that i personally do not take as seriously as i should. He then goes on to compare programming to the practice of a martial art and discusses many types of practice such as kata. This is a small programming exercise that you can practice repeatedly so that you can become a better programmer. This will allow you to spend less time thinking about the typing and the syntax and more time thinking about the harder problem at hand. There are a large amount of resources out there for young developers to practice, one of them being Codewars which calls its practice problems kata and structures itself very similarly to the way that Martin suggested that we were to practice.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Journal by jtassone93 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.