A short guide to quality best practices for developers.
By Garrett Berg vitiral@gmail.com
This is a short and open-source book aimed at helping software developers improve their software quality. It is also the primary user guide for the design doc tool artifact. Its targeted audience are those who:
- know at least one programming language
- know revision control. If you don't know one, learn git
- want a brief guide on how to have fewer bugs, re-designs and headaches in all of their projects
This book can be read in full at gitbooks.
If you have suggestions or edits, you should be able to "start a new discussion" by hovering over a paragraph and clicking the "+" button to the right of it. You can also open an issue
The goal of this book is to make developing software simpler and more fun. Think
back to the time you first learned revision control. How you were backing up
files before then? Maybe you were copying folders to some backups folder?
Maybe you were not backing up at all?
However you did (or didn't) track your changes, think about your life before and after revision control. Things were a lot different, and all you had to learn in order to use revision control were:
- some simple vocabulary
- an easy to use tool
- a new way of looking at things
This is the central premise of this book: you don't need to understand technical jargon or complex test methodologies to realize huge gains in the quality of your software. Some simple vocabulary, new tools and new ways of looking at things are all you need.
All code/documentation examples in this book are public domain. The rest of the book is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 License.