Good Habits for Great Coding: Improving Programming Skills with Examples in Python

Improve your coding skills and learn how to write readable code. Rather than

teach basic programming, this book presumes that readers understand the

fundamentals, and offers time-honed best practices for style, design,

documenting, testing, refactoring, and more.

Taking an informal, conversational tone, author Michael Stueben offers

programming stories, anecdotes, observations, advice, tricks, examples, and

challenges based on his 38 years experience writing code and teaching

programming classes. Trying to teach style to beginners is notoriously

difficult and can easily appear pedantic. Instead, this book offers solutions

and many examples to back up his ideas.

_Good Habits for Great Coding_ distills Stueben's three decades of analyzing

his own mistakes, analyzing student mistakes, searching for problems that

teach lessons, and searching for simple examples to illustrate complex ideas.

Having found that most learn by trying out challenging problems, and

reflecting on them, each chapter includes quizzes and problems. The final

chapter introduces dynamic programming to reduce complex problems to subcases,

and illustrates many concepts discussed in the book.

Code samples are provided in Python and designed to be understandable by

readers familiar with any modern programming language. At the end of this

book, you will have acquired a lifetime of good coding advice, the lessons the

author wishes he had learned when he was a novice.

**What You'll Learn**

Create readable code through examples of good and bad style

Write difficult algorithms by comparing your code to the author's code

Derive and code difficult algorithms using dynamic programming

Understand the psychology of the coding process

**Who This Book Is For**

Students or novice programmers who have taken a beginning programming course

and understand coding basics. Teachers will appreciate the author's road-

tested ideas that they may apply to their own teaching.