Being a Better Programmer

I saw this in my twitter feed:

Highly polished and impressive videos on the Essentials of Programming: hillelcoren.com/coder

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) January 20, 2012

I watched through the whole thing, and it is indeed an impressive collection of tips to becoming a better programmer. The videos cover a breadth of topics in a short period of time. To give you a taste, the first unit covers managing complexity, the single responsibility principle, separation of concerns, TDD and design patterns. And that’s only the first 2 minutes. The total running time is 20 minutes, so you should watch them:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngSDsY7VqRg&w=560&h=315\]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBysCfzflvA&w=560&h=315\]

The videos have a strange feel to them, since they use public domain clips overlaid with After Effects-generated titles and effects. The visuals are not crucial and more often than not, result in curious juxtapositions of software wisdom with campy footage. Regardless, the content is great.

Thursday, January 26, 2012