[NCLUG] programming question

[mike cullerton]

on 7/1/01 2:03 PM, J. Paul Reed at preed at sigkill.com wrote:

> On Sun, 1 Jul 2001, mike cullerton wrote:
> 
>> i was wondering when you'd pipe in :)
> 
> You know me... I'm always around, lurkin'...
> 
>> [just to make sure people know where i'm coming from, i've had no formal
>> training in programming except for 2 general pascal classes required for
>> my math degree 15 years ago. all my coding to date (which hasn't really
>> been that much) has been procedural. this current project is in php]
> 
> You know, Cal Poly is going to be the 2nd school in the nation to offer a
> software engineering degree, which is distinctly different from a computer
> science degree.
> 
> I just thought I'd throw that in there because I thought it was interesting
> that the engineering of software is really becomming a different area from
> computer science.

ya know, this is really kinda cool. it seems to be getting easier and easier
to write code these days, but that doesn't mean that any of these new
'programmers' (read me) know anything about software design. it's like
people who are paid to produce code are becoming more dime a dozen, but
folks who understand programming are harder to find.

> 
>> this is kind of what got me to ask the question in the first place. user
>> code will be run on every page. registration code will be run much less
>> frequently. i wondered how the different approaches could take advantage of
>> this fact.
> 
> Hrm... well, then it would make sense that you would want to separate those
> somehow.
> 
> One thing I've noticed as I do more OO-type design is that some things fit
> really nicely i.e. messages (which can be subclassed by message type),
> database connections (which can be subclassed by DB type), etc., and
> sometimes, you end up getting these objects that don't make sense, such as
> a "registration engine" or an "event loop engine" that represent a sort of
> "manager" of other smaller object types and become points of execution for
> management of those objects.

this is exactly the kind of thing i'm trying to learn with this project.
when is it appropriate to include objects in my code and how to break them
up. 

> 
> If you're really looking to do OO design well, you may want to take a look
> at the standard book on the subject, excitingly titled "Design Patterns."
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201633612/o/qid=994017003/sr=2-1/102-3
> 124347-5552128

thanks. i checked it out and it seems like everyone has nice things to say
about it. i'll have to go to the bookstore tommorrow :)

 -- mike cullerton