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Continuing my programming tips series we have the first guest post from LukasS.

Divide (not conquer), Indent, Comment and Name

We all started programming at some point in our life, some of us on our own, some under guidance of teachers, parents, but even now there are few tips, that should be known by everyone. Here is the four (unordered list):

Divide - when you write any code, you can easily get overwhelmed by the amount of information or functions that can be contained in a single line, come to think of it, you can write whole software in one line, but that’s bad idea! (definitely), so use your „Enter” as much as possible, your code becomes stressed out on more lines, but it’s getting easier to read this way and to upgrade most importantly.

Probably most useful is to divide with new line any braces, these will allow you to clearly see when specific function/control statement starts and where it ends. Use new line to divide clusters of code, thanks to this you can create groups of code, each with specific task, which is easier to read.

Indent - if I get a hold of someone else’s code, the second thing I do (after dividing it), I use my TAB key as much as is need to structure the code even more. With combination of dividing and indenting you can easily move to third part which is:

Comment - professor on my academy, once said, that when we will work on bigger projects, an equivalent of A4 size of paper of code, will be filled with up to 50% of the area with comments. At the beginning of programming journey (and some even later) people are too lazy to comment the code and when it comes to upgrade it, after few months of not seeing it (or sometimes even earlier) many spend hours figuring „what the hell is that all about”. My friend is using comments to display step by step what actions specified file does — he wrote a simple parser that fetches all one-line-comments and displays it in a clear list. This can be helpful when you have one large file with many actions / functions.

One final TIP, but I think most important, even if you don’t like to divide your code, indent or comment it – name your variables / functions accordingly to what they contain or do, You can use capital letters or underscore to create more readable names. When you look at something like this: $tempcustomnonassociativearray it’s hard to see what that means comparing to: $temp_custom_non_associative_array.

Don’t forget to organize, organize and organize.

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If you have any programming tips that you would like to share with my readers please send them in via my contact form. I will be picking a ‘best tip’ which will be rewarded with a license for Zend Studio Professional.