NYCPHP Meetup

[Philip Camilleri]

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> 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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