I have to strongly second this. Learning programming means learning
algorithms and data structures. Learning the job a programmer does
includes version control, unit testing and many other things. Learning
a language or ten is one of those other things, but it's not part of
learning programming, it's learning syntax.
Being a competent professional programmer means learning all of them,
but version control doesn't include syntax and programming doesn't
include PHP. A book on PHP shouldn't include data structures OR version
control - those are separate subjects.
My not-even-two-cents.
On 1/23/2012 1:27 PM, Philip Camilleri wrote:
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
<mailto: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.
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