Learning to Program

Performance

When you talk about the performance of your software, you are talking about how fast the software does its job. You can improve performance in several ways, and they depend on the environment in which you are working. In general, though, you can improve performance by minimizing the number of instructions that your program has to execute to do its job. For example, if your program uses a loop, remove any instructions from the loop that don’t absolutely have to be there. A big part of studying algorithms is understanding why programs run slow and how to make them run faster. If you are interested in learning more about performance, you can find a lot of online algorithms classes (see Chapter 13, “Learning to Fish: How to Acquire a ...