OK so in this post I won’t include any code actually…honestly it’s just to mark that I’ve gone through column 5. BTW it’s also the closure of part I – programming preliminaries.

The content of programming pearls is very well design and organized. So far (for part I) it shows the process and the keys for programming: understand and define the problem – design algorithms – design data structure – the practice of writing correct program and verification – then comes to this column: different matters during programming, like scaffolding, assertions, functional / unit test, perf benchmarking, etc.

On a side note, programming is not a fixed thing: there are far more than one models to define a problem, there are lots of choices of algorithms depending on your problem model and primitives, there are a lot of data structure choices that could impact your algorithm or even problem definition. Things are linked together and reflect each other. It’s a process of evolution: understand the problem gradually, refine algorithm / data structure gradually, etc. And the usage of different skills like debugging, asserting, scaffolding will help speed up the process.

BTW, it’s interesting to see it’s mentioning a book published by M$ which talks about M$ assertion best practices…