Gary, Part of me thinks this is a great idea. Another part of me thinks you're thinking inside the box. Why not have a "How to really program" class where you introduce these topics, functional and OOP, MVC, go over the basics of a few languages, and stuff like that?
I would have loved something like that. Heck, I still would! Have you read Zed Shaw's "How to program python the hard way"? Leam On 1/23/12, 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://www.nyphp.org/show-participation > -- Mind on a Mission <http://leamhall.blogspot.com/> _______________________________________________ New York PHP User Group Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk http://www.nyphp.org/show-participation
