Seeing the wood for the trees.
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-08-06 06:52:49 - Graham EllisI write training notes and examples, showing people how things work in Perl / PHP / other languages.
Newcomers need short examples to show them the real "nuts and bolts" of how a job is done. Live applications need additional code for error checking, for handling security issues, and to make applications robust and user friendly. As a rule of thumb, this extra code accounts for over 50% of the code volume.
Solution(s) to this dilemma.
a) Examples in our training folders are kept short so that newcomers CAN see the wood without it being lost in the trees
b) Training notes include warnings that the code shows the mechanisms, but needs to be extended to take into account usability / error / security issues as applicable to the individual application
c) All examples include a disclaimer when displayed on our web site which emphasises that they are training examples.
d) During our courses, we include coverage of programming standards / security / maintainability issues, with examples. Coverage of these important topics is more thorough than you would expect, and we include the subject on private courses even if it's not explicitly requested by the customer.