NYCPHP Meetup

[leam hall]

Gary,

Part of me thinks this is a great idea. Another part of me thinks
you're thinking inside the box. Why not have a "How to really program"
class where you introduce these topics, functional and OOP, MVC, go
over the basics of a few languages, and stuff like that?

I would have loved something like that. Heck, I still would! Have you
read Zed Shaw's "How to program python the hard way"?

Leam

On 1/23/12, Gary Mort <garyamort at gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing that has annoyed me more and more over time is the way books
> and classes go about teaching /how/ to program in a language.
>
> They all start off with "Hello World" and then progress slowly form
> there to more and more complicated things.  I've noticed that even Ruby
> books, the poster child for unit testing, proceed in this manner.
>
> In short, they wait until /after/ someone has developed bad habits and
> then introduce version control and unit testing as an afterthought.
>
> It seems to me that the /correct/ way to teach programming is to start
> with a little version control, then do a little unit testing, and then
> proceed to the coding.  Especially useful is to structure the course so
> that the users experience just /why/ version control and unit tests are
> a good thing.
>
> As such, I'm going to try to put together a course on learning to
> program PHP the right way.
>
> It starts off with learning a minimal number of git commands[you don't
> need to know them all, and there is no reason to confuse yourself at
> this point!  All you need are "git clone...", "git commit...", and "git
> push..." while not necessary is a nice to have.  This unit will include
> cloning an existing code repository on github, making a change, and
> commiting your change.
>
> The code should include a class or two /and/ some incomplete unit tests
> for said class.
>
> The next step is learning some basic unit test commands, run the unit
> tests on the code to see them working, demonstration of how to run the
> checks so you can see what methods are not currently covered by unit tests.
>
> Unit tests are fairly trivial bits of code, so the first introduction to
> coding will be to add the missing unit tests.  Verify the addition.
> Commit the changes.
>
> After that, we can do the traditional "hello world" app....the RIGHT
> way, ie make a unit test for it, then implement it.  Verify the new
> code.  Commit the changes.
>
> Next up will be making some major functional changes to the code,
> extending it, expanding it, etc.  At this point, we should be doing some
> fairly radical, but simple, changes to the code where we will be
> deleting entire sets of logic and replacing them with new sets -
> including changing the unit tests first!  Verify the new code.  Commit
> the changes.
>
> Following all these changes, we will now have to undo some of the
> modifications and use the original code....  so a quick review now of
> how to use git to browse through previous commits, review differences in
> code, etc.  And of course, as always start with unit tests, verify the
> changes, commit the changes.
>
>
> As you can see from the above, this also explains /why/ programming
> books suck so much.  It's a lot of extra verbage to go step by step
> through the testing/commit process - and programmers are by nature
> lazy!  So they skip it.
>
> I'm curious if there are any other items people think should be
> incorporated into this tutorial.
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