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Code Reading & Reading

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Pawan Kumar
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159 views

Code Reading & Reading

Uploaded by

Pawan Kumar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CODE READING & READING

http://www.tutorialspoint.com/developers_best_practices/code_reading.htm Copyright © tutorialspoint.com

Best Practice 1- Keep Reading Existing Software Source Code


Let me ask you few basic questions before we start with one of the most important best practices
required for a software developer.

Do you read movie magazines?


Do you read newspapers?
Do you read roadside advertisements?
Do you read junk written here and there?
Do you just read....?

Definitely your answer will be positive but if I ask you one more question in the series:

Do you read Software Source Code?


Only few software developers will have positive answer because reading and understanding an
existing software source code is the most boring task. If you are one of them who feels reading
software source code is a boring task, then you are missing one of the most important best
practices, which a software developer should have in his/her life.

If you want to become a novelist, can you just start writing novels? I would say 100% no!!, you
definitely need to read hundreds of novels before you start writing GOOD novels. If you want to
become a movie script writer, can you start writing good movie scripts until you have gone through
various good movie scripts?, again my answer would be no!!

So, if you want to write a good software code, then how it will be possible for you to write a good
source code without reading tons of source codes? Even if you will write something, then how
would you and know which the best is?
Reading source code written by others gives you opportunity to criticize the mistakes done in
writing that code. You will be able to identify the mistakes other software developers have done in
their source code which you should not repeat.

There are many attributes of software codes indentation, comments, historyheader, functionstructure, etc. ,
which you will learn by reading existing code, specially, a code written by well-experienced
software developers. Spend some time in reading others' source code and I'm sure you would be
able to write BEAUTIFUL source code in few days or few weeks and you will be able to fix the
mistakes, which you were doing so far in writing the source code.

One thing to experiment, just go in the past and check the code you had written few years ago, you
will definitely laugh....because you are always improving by doing practice.
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