The Coding Survival Guide 1
Introduction
Learning how to code can be an enjoyable experience and a challenging one. You have to
be a person who is willing to sit on a problem for an hour, a day, a week or even a month
before the answer finally hits you. It is a profession where there are a lot of problems to
solve and you are expected to provide a lot of solutions. But those solutions will reward you
with a sense of accomplishment; a sense that you beat the problem and that can be a
euphoric experience.
Our only hope, as programmers, is that we learn enough tools and techniques to make the
problems we face seem less daunting. Maybe even allow us to get to the more difficult
problems which will change the world. This survival guide is meant to provide you with
some tips and tricks I have learned over the past 16 years of developing. By learning these
tricks I hope you will find programming a little easier and sharpen your programming skills.
In other words, I hope these tricks will help you stand on the shoulders of giants.
This guide will be your ticket to learning about the great habits you should embrace and the
pitfalls many programmers face during their careers. I have bundled this guide with the
popular ebook “The Programmers Idea Book: 200 Software Project Ideas and Tips to
Developing them” to provide you some direction while you code your next project. If you find
yourself stuck, review these tips and tricks and see if perhaps one will help you with your
current situation. Enjoy!
Habits You Should Embrace
Stubbing - Stubbing is the process by which you first identify the functions, methods,
classes, structures and files you will need to help solve the problem. You then code the
framework of those pieces to fill in later with detail. For example, if you were building a
calculator you might need functions to handle each of the arithmetic operations... add,
subtract, multiply, divide and maybe a function to print a sum of values. Below are three
stubs for add, subtract and a third to print the sum of values in an array. Notice that we have
only written the “signature” of these functions and have not actually written their function
bodies.
int add(int num1, int num2) {
}
int subtract(int num1, int num2) {
}
void printSum(int nums[]) {
