6 Steps for fixing any bug
Hate bugs? Yeah everybody does. Here are six steps that should resolve virtually every bug you encounter.
A brief intro into unit testing with JUnit
Learning how to use the built-in IDE debuggers and write unit tests is as fundamental to being a developer as knowing how to write a for loop. These two tools will save you countless hours of frustration and help you write better code. Entire books are written on just these subjects, however today I will just give a simple tutorial on writing unit tests.
Link Dump 9/28
http://www.javaworld.com/ - An excellent Java resource
http://onjava.com/ - A blog covering java (obviously) supported by O'Reilly Media
http://martinfowler.com/ - The website for one of the most respected voices in OO-development
Trends: Should developers know SQL?
I recently have been involved in a lot of refactoring work at my company. One issue we ran into was our usage of SQL in our applications, we had a habit of including a lot of business logic in SQL. To make the applications more maintainable we moved a lot of our business logic from SQL to Java. While I believe we made the right decision to remove the business logic from SQL I don't think it would be in all scenarios.
7 tips for every person wishing to be a programmer
If you are interested in pursuing a career in software development these tips could help make the road to accomplishing that goal a lot less bumpy. Below is seven tips that can help prepare you for a career in software development and make the first few months a lot less painful.
Trends: Is it time to throw out checked exceptions?
Going through school and much of my career I would follow the orthodoxy of using checked exceptions to handle exceptional conditions. While it isn't too difficult to trace down a bug when a school project is only a small collection of 5 to 15 code files, it is an entirely different issue when it comes to enterprise level development.
Trends: Getters and Setters, going the way of the dinosaur?
Like all developers I was always taught to use getter and setters to access the internal members of an external class, and up until recently I accepted this idiom blindly. Not too long ago I was on a discussion board when a young developer asked what the getters and setters were doing in a snippet of code.
Link Dump 9/21
http://www.coderanch.com/forums - A very friendly place with an active community dedicated to helping developers
http://www.webappers.com/ - Regularly updated with predominately open source software to help you do your job
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/ - Name says it all. A site that is dedicated towards web design.
If, else and nothing else
When I was still very new to programming I had a bad habit of writing bloated code. One of my worse areas was when it came to the usage of If statements. Often times I would write a whole if/else block when I could had just as easily gotten the same results in just one line of code.
Foreach isn’t a reach in pre-1.5
Developers living in the post 1.5 world are spoiled. With the very sweet foreach loop life is easy when you need to iterate through a list of objects. While us poor developers still living working with 1.4 or lower may not be able to totally match the 1.5 foreach loop we can certainly come close! While there are several ways to implement foreach functionality in 1.4 or below I will focus on the way I prefer to do it as I think it is the best way.
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