Learning to Program

Best Practices

Certain coding standards go beyond the actual writing of code. The standards I refer to are documentation, planning, and testing. These best practices will help you become a great programmer who writes great programs. As you learn to effectively use these three tools, your confidence in your programs will increase. When I built my first website, I did very little planning and testing, and I documented only occasionally. As a result, I had very little confidence in the website. I was nervous every time I made a change, major or minor. Would my new code break everything? If the website crashed, would I be able to fix it? It turns out that my fears were justified; I broke the website frequently, and sometimes I couldn’t figure out ...