Developing Good Programming Habits

do you mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_style

or tips for not making mistakes?

 

style and indentation is one thing. It is our code, so can you follow your rules about indentation.

Stuff that helped me is to use descriptive variable names and don't' abbreviate them. No "int i" but "int loopCounter"

Avoid "For i=" loops. Forin loops take away the hassle of sorting out the end condition.

Code:

it(!someLogicTest)

is a pain to troubleshoot. Maybe it's me getting old but

Code:

 if(NO == someLogicTest) 

is much easier to understand. Having the NO in "NO == someLogicTest" come first will help to avoid the occasional mistake between "=" and "==".

Give all your if's an else, give all your switch's an default: At least consider them when planning the program flow.

There is probably more, but can't think of it now.

 

Will, I understand your question because I learn and create these small apps and I wonder if I am using good coding habits too.

The first objective C program I wrote from my mac, I wrote all in 1 class and use the [self someMthod]; to call the different methods. Someone pointed out that I have clearly missed the the point of using objects. But even though I did not use different objects to perform tasks the program still worked I thought.

The next app I worked on for the iphone I had different ViewControllers but I wrote all the code in the viewControllers from fetching Plists to parsing data. Everything for that view was in the viewController. If another ViewController needed to access the same files I would just copy paste those methods into the new ViewController.

After all that, people pointed out that I should not do that but have a model MVC design. That the ViewController should kind of pass thing to the view and I should process data someplace else.

So now days, I might still be wrong, but I use 1 large class which is a subClass of NSObject that I write all my methods that all of my ViewControllers would need to access. An example if 2 objects need access to the same Property List that contains an NSDictionary, I just have 1 method written that returns an NSDictionary from that property list. I just instantiate that object, send a message to that instance method and NSDictionary is returned for my view to use.

I don't know if this method is right way of doing it or a good habit, but it seems pretty clean and it works. I'll wait until someone points out my flaws and adjust again.

 

One habit I've gotten in to, not sure if good or bad, is to over indent Comments and NSLog calls.

That way you can read down the left for code, read down the right for notes you've left for what code should be doing. The trick seems to be to get enough tabs so your eye can pick up the line and read the column, but not so many that it's too hard to read them together. Great thing with text colouring most of the right hand column is green so NSLogs stand out.

 

I found this book http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882 to be quite helpful.

And you can look here for some helpful hints about structuring your code http://www.cimgf.com/zds-code-style-guide/. I don't necessarily agree with everything but most of what is listed there.

 

http://www.billthelizard.com/2008/12/books-programmers-dont-really-read.html

Have a look on this .

http://www.billthelizard.com/2008/12/books-programmers-dont-really-read.html

Have a look on code complete. Its really amazing

 

*choose good variable names
*do error checking often
*work out what you want to do first with pencil & paper (handy having an exercise book)
*run often debug & release builds

 

Two more suggestions:
1. Learn the debugger.
2. Write unit tests.

The purpose: to see what's really happening in your program.