How to Easily Understand Unfamiliar Code

re: How to Easily Understand Unfamiliar Code

Monkeyget — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:13:24 GMT

Interesting.

I'm really bad/slow at reading source code no matter if it's delibarately obfuscated code, good code, or code i wrote 6 months ago.

I usually open the various source files trying to get a general sense of what's going on (and fail).

Also I don't like modifying code until I have deep understanding of how it's working (which is hard since there is a lot of details to keep in mind).

I'll definitley try the 'public interface' technique the next time i'll read foreign code.

Advice to Design Document Writers

cashto's blog — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:40:15 GMT

After having reviewed three ... suboptimal ... design documents this week, I feel I should really say

re: How to Easily Understand Unfamiliar Code

Gopi — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:45:07 GMT

Fine for me just i will go through ur steps

re: How to Easily Understand Unfamiliar Code

mohammed — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:30:41 GMT

or just read "code reading" a very useful book in the

same subject :)

http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading

re: How to Easily Understand Unfamiliar Code

cleek — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:47:47 GMT

"It's just that I look at different things than they do."

well, sure. not having to work through the chore of solving the problem the original coder solved is a luxury that allows you to look at things like organization and structure. you've skipped over the "thank god i've got this working" stage and landed smack in the middle of "since i've got nothing better to do, how about i make this code pretty" stage.