Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software

Description:

Coder to Developer helps you excel at the many non-coding tasks entailed, from start to finish, in just about any successful development project. What's more, it equips you with the mindset and self-assurance required to pull it all together, so that you see every piece of your work as part of a coherent process. Inside, you'll find plenty of technical guidance on such topics as:

• Choosing and using a source code control system
• Code generation tools—when and why
• Preventing bugs with unit testing
• Tracking, fixing, and learning from bugs
• Application activity logging
• Streamlining and systematizing the build process
• Traditional installations and alternative approaches

To pull all of this together, the author has provided the source code for Download Tracker, a tool for organizing your collection of downloaded code, that's used for examples throughout this book. The code is provided in various states of completion, reflecting every stage of development, so that you can dig deep into the actual process of building software. But you’ll also develop “softer” skills, in areas such as team management, open source collaboration, user and developer documentation, and intellectual property protection. If you want to become someone who can deliver not just good code but also a good product, this book is the place to start. If you must build successful software projects, it’s essential reading.

Table of Contents:

Foreword
Introduction

Chapter 1: Planning Your Project
Chapter 2: Organizing Your Project
Chapter 3: Using Source Code Control Effectively
Chapter 4: Coding Defensively
Chapter 5: Preventing Bugs with Unit Testing
Chapter 6: Pumping Up the IDE
Chapter 7: Digging Into Source Code
Chapter 8: Generating Code
Chapter 9: Tracking and Squashing Bugs
Chapter 10: Logging Application Activity
Chapter 11: Working with Small Teams
Chapter 12: Creating Documentation
Chapter 13: Mastering the Build Process
Chapter 14: Protecting Your Intellectual Property
Chapter 15: Delivering the Application

Index