hi Gary, to be honest I would argue that such things as Version Control and Unit Testing do not really belong in a language-specific text-book or tutorial. After all, one does not try to teach program control, binary logic, control and data structures, and the like in a language-specific text-book either, right?
I definitely *strongly* agree that programmers (the ones I come across, at least) seem to learn a language (PHP, Ruby, etc), but don't seem to understand much about the underlying or adjacent issues (version control, unit testing are among those; but also such fundamental things as the important differences between data-types, appropriate use of different data-structures, performance optimization, etc) However, all of these should be taught to programmers. One can know a language inside-out, but without "real technical knowledge", a programmer can only go so far... just my two cents... P. On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Gary Mort <garyam...@gmail.com> wrote: > One thing that has annoyed me more and more over time is the way books and > classes go about teaching /how/ to program in a language. > > They all start off with "Hello World" and then progress slowly form there > to more and more complicated things. I've noticed that even Ruby books, > the poster child for unit testing, proceed in this manner. > > In short, they wait until /after/ someone has developed bad habits and > then introduce version control and unit testing as an afterthought. > > It seems to me that the /correct/ way to teach programming is to start > with a little version control, then do a little unit testing, and then > proceed to the coding. Especially useful is to structure the course so > that the users experience just /why/ version control and unit tests are a > good thing. > > As such, I'm going to try to put together a course on learning to program > PHP the right way. > > It starts off with learning a minimal number of git commands[you don't > need to know them all, and there is no reason to confuse yourself at this > point! All you need are "git clone...", "git commit...", and "git push..." > while not necessary is a nice to have. This unit will include cloning an > existing code repository on github, making a change, and commiting your > change. > > The code should include a class or two /and/ some incomplete unit tests > for said class. > > The next step is learning some basic unit test commands, run the unit > tests on the code to see them working, demonstration of how to run the > checks so you can see what methods are not currently covered by unit tests. > > Unit tests are fairly trivial bits of code, so the first introduction to > coding will be to add the missing unit tests. Verify the addition. Commit > the changes. > > After that, we can do the traditional "hello world" app....the RIGHT way, > ie make a unit test for it, then implement it. Verify the new code. > Commit the changes. > > Next up will be making some major functional changes to the code, > extending it, expanding it, etc. At this point, we should be doing some > fairly radical, but simple, changes to the code where we will be deleting > entire sets of logic and replacing them with new sets - including changing > the unit tests first! Verify the new code. Commit the changes. > > Following all these changes, we will now have to undo some of the > modifications and use the original code.... so a quick review now of how > to use git to browse through previous commits, review differences in code, > etc. And of course, as always start with unit tests, verify the changes, > commit the changes. > > > As you can see from the above, this also explains /why/ programming books > suck so much. It's a lot of extra verbage to go step by step through the > testing/commit process - and programmers are by nature lazy! So they skip > it. > > I'm curious if there are any other items people think should be > incorporated into this tutorial. > ______________________________**_________________ > New York PHP User Group Community Talk Mailing List > http://lists.nyphp.org/**mailman/listinfo/talk<http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk> > > http://www.nyphp.org/show-**participation<http://www.nyphp.org/show-participation> >
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