NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

I personally think that when instructing someone in how to program for a 
language, one should include good practices - including choosing good 
data structures for the example code and explaining why they are 
chosen.  That is another issue I have with programming books, they often 
include some truly atrocious code.  For example, most of the mysql 
sample code does not include escaping the data to avoid injection.  Data 
inputs generally do not include sanitizing the data.

Since a lot of people will go directly from the example code to using 
that code with slight modifications on their own personal website, the 
examples should be secure.  About the only thing I'm not gung ho on is 
Git.  Any version control system[even CVS] is fine.  However, since the 
commands that will be gone over are primarily clone, add, commit, and 
maybe push - they are simply commands with equivalents in all the 
version control systems.  Git simply has the benefit of github, so part 
of the instructional code can be a github repo.

Also when your learning to code, your adopting habits.  If your habits 
are jumping straight to the code and not committing changes and testing, 
then it is just that much harder to learn about it later.

Though I do admit calling "the right way" is controversial - I simply 
can't think of any other wording that would be short AND summarize the 
goal of the course....maybe "Learning to Program PHP 
Professionally"....though I'm sure lots of professionals would then 
object that their being dissed. :-)

On 1/23/2012 1:42 PM, Rukbat wrote:
> I have to strongly second this.  Learning programming means learning 
> algorithms and data structures.  Learning the job a programmer does 
> includes version control, unit testing and many other things.  
> Learning a language or ten is one of those other things, but it's not 
> part of learning programming, it's learning syntax.
>
> Being a competent professional programmer means learning all of them, 
> but version control doesn't include syntax and programming doesn't 
> include PHP.  A book on PHP shouldn't include data structures OR 
> version control - those are separate subjects.
>
> My not-even-two-cents.
>
> On 1/23/2012 1:27 PM, Philip Camilleri wrote:
>> hi Gary, to be honest I would argue that such things as Version 
>> Control and Unit Testing do not really belong in a language-specific 
>> text-book or tutorial. After all, one does not try to teach program 
>> control, binary logic, control and data structures, and the like in a 
>> language-specific text-book either, right?
>>
>> I definitely *strongly* agree that programmers (the ones I come 
>> across, at least) seem to learn a language (PHP, Ruby, etc), but 
>> don't seem to understand much about the underlying or adjacent issues 
>> (version control, unit testing are among those; but also such 
>> fundamental things as the important differences between data-types, 
>> appropriate use of different data-structures, performance 
>> optimization, etc)
>>
>> However, all of these should be taught to programmers. One can know a 
>> language inside-out, but without "real technical knowledge", a 
>> programmer can only go so far...
>>
>> just my two cents...
>>
>> P.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Gary Mort <garyamort at gmail.com 
>> <mailto: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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