An Intro into Test Driven Development with JUnit4
Please read the technical guide before starting this tutorial.
This article will mark the first of a long-term series covering professional software development. For the lowdown on this project check out this article. Be sure to give me your feedback as it will be vital in helping me develop better tutorials in the future.
Test driven development seemed like a natural choice as a lead off to my series of tutorials as I had to explain why I am writing all these tests. It is also a very good development methodology that will actually save a lot of time by reducing the amount of time spent debugging. For this tutorial and the entire project, I will be using Junit4. For a synopsis on test driven development you can check out the wikipedia article here. If you need a brief refresher on JUnit you can read my tutorial here (written in Junit3).
Link Dump 10/13
http://www.codeigniter.com – An excellent and lightweight framework for developing PHP applications
http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/ - I may not agree with everything the author says and frankly he probably doesn't care. But there is plenty of good information on his site none the less.
http://solitarygeek.com/ - If you like my site then you will probably love this one. Similar in writing style and purpose, just a more mature blog written by a more experienced developer.
Link Dump 10/6
http://sourcemaking.com/ - Co-authored by Martin Fowler, a bunch of useful information and best practices on this site.
http://www.pbell.com/index.cfm/design-patterns -A wealth of information covering many different areas of programming. Definitely something here for everybody.
http://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/ - A well established blog with hundreds of articles covering mostly Java.
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
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.
Link Dump 9/17
http://www.sixrevisions.com/ - A very active website that focuses on web design.
http://www.net.tutsplus.com/ - Has excellent tutorials on web design and development
http://java.sun.com/blueprints/corej2eepatterns/Patterns/index.html – An absolute must check out for all Java developers. Focuses on best practices for Java developers. Though I wouldn't recommend it for the very new as the concepts may be a bit advanced.
http://www.ohloh.net/ - A very good place to start if you are looking to contribute to an open source project.
Link Dump
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ - An excellent with a focus on front end web development. Frequently updated with very well written articles.
http://www.alistapart.com/ - Another excellent website focusing on web development. However there is more of an emphasis of best practices, growing trends, and new ideas, instead of just the latest technologies.
http://www.javamex.com/ - A java site that does a really good job of getting down into the nuts a bolts of how Java works.
How Java handles objects
How Java handles objects had always been a thorny issue for me. I don't know if it was a case of never being taught properly or my personal inability to learn, but I either way by the time I began my professional development career I only had very loose understanding of how Java handles objects. This gap in my knowledge impacted my ability to be an effective developer; my code had more bugs and implementing changes was more difficult. I remember many of my friends back in school also having trouble here, so I will spend my first real post (yay!) covering this important subject.
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