I first encountered routines in QBasic, around the time I started high school. I had been using GOTO and GOSUB commands in GW-BASIC for quite some time, but in QBasic, you had the ability to separate the code out from your main program, and to isolate...

Separating classes into groups allows for a further level of abstraction than classes alone. In C#, this is done by the use of namespaces, in Java, this is done using Packages. The end result in either case is that you can ignore the internal details...

If you drop a good developer into a project being written in any language, they’ll still be a good developer. The foundations are the same, regardless of the language, but there are some differences that can trip you up if you aren’t careful. These aren...

When I started programming in an Object Oriented language, I was of the impression that everything should be a class. If something wasn’t inherently obvious as to how it should be implemented as a class, it must have been because I didn’t understand OOP...

I like the idea of rules of thumb for coding. People a lot smarter than me have done a lot of research to figure these things out, so I figure it’s the least I can do to reap the benefits that come from them. One I heard a while back, and have found to...

If you haven’t seen a good number of the suggestions in this section being violated, rest assured that you will. I actually cringed at a couple of them, remembering times where I had struggled with overly exposed classes and eroded class interfaces. ...

When I was studying ADTs in university, they didn’t make a lot of sense to me. They were treated as some theoretical concept, something you would only do as an exercise. In truth, we were using ADTs, but not to their full potential. We would abstract...