Reading Code

Syllabus for Reading Code

Wed, 2010-08-25 02:56

Rough Schedule of languages and frameworks (subject to discussion and changes as a function of group preferences):

week 1: PhP: Wordpress, Drupal. Tools: Grep, view-source, firebug/developer tools

week 2: Ruby: Ruby on Rails, Sinatra?

week 3: Python (tornado, python driver for mongodb)

week 4: Javascript (NodeJS, Jquery, maybe Processing.js or Protoviz)

week 5: (Start project) Databases (mongodb, cassandra? couch? htm5 in-browser storage?)

week 6: Erlang: RabbitMQ (AMQP application), jabber?

Other possible options to incorporate:
Clojure : compojure (web framework)
Java: servlets
Perl
Scheme
Bash
... feel free to suggest more.

revisions

Comments

This article might sound more

madarve

Mon, 2010-09-13 04:04

This article might sound more like a rant, but it was the first one that came to my mind when i saw this course, overall is a succinct advice on reading code.

http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1275816630.html

link to this comment

Not too much of a rant-- this

Jessy Cowan-Sharp

Mon, 2010-09-13 04:27

Not too much of a rant-- this is fantastic!

link to this comment

That is certainly not a rant.

Adam Collado

Mon, 2010-09-13 04:44

That is certainly not a rant. That's purely awesome. I've printed out code that I had trouble reading before, and writing notes next to all variables and functions and so on; it worked wonders.

link to this comment

Here's some more interesting

Jessy Cowan-Sharp

Thu, 2010-09-16 15:34

Here's some more interesting articles related to the course:

Why it's useful to read code and why it helps software re-use:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Two good articles with tips for reading code:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TipsForReadingCode
http://www.skorks.com/2010/05/why-i-love-reading-other-peoples-code-and-...

link to this comment

Given that Jessy already

Nadeem Shabir

Sun, 2010-09-19 14:10

Given that Jessy already linked through to Joel's post, I thought it might be useful to also point people to the following, both by Paul Graham:

Succinctness is Power:
http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html

What Languages Fix, (this is always amusing but oddly revealing):
http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html

And here's a blog post written by Omer Gertel recently that I found fascinating:
http://omergertel.com/2010/07/04/how-to-read-code/

link to this comment

cool articles nadeem! neat to see how peoples' actual eyeballs move as they read code-- although i agree with the post author that it would have been nice to see the experiment run on more than 5 people.