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Practical Development Environments
Filed Under (Programming) by Abdul Jaleel Malik on 21-08-2008
Tagged Under : Programming, Software Development
Book description
Everyone wants a good technical environment for developing their software, and Practical Development Environments contains helpful guidelines for how to create and maintain a great development environment. It discusses some of the current tools that are available, covering different areas such as version control, build tools, testing tools, bug tracking systems, documentation environments, release tools, and maintenance.
This book doesn’t tell you how to write faster code, or how to write code with fewer memory leaks, or even how to debug code at all. What it does tell you is how to build your product in better ways, how to keep track of the code that you write, and how to track the bugs in your code. Plus some more things you’ll wish you had known before starting a project.
Practical Development Environments is a guide, a collection of advice about real development environments for small to medium-sized projects and groups. Each of the chapters considers a different kind of tool - tools for tracking versions of files, build tools, testing tools, bug-tracking tools, tools for creating documentation, and tools for creating packaged releases. Each chapter discusses what you should look for in that kind of tool and what to avoid, and also describes some good ideas, bad ideas, and annoying experiences for each area. Specific instances of each type of tool are described in enough detail so that you can decide which ones you want to investigate further.
Developers want to write code, not maintain makefiles. Writers want to write content instead of manage templates. IT provides machines, but doesn’t have time to maintain all the different tools. Managers want the product to move smoothly from development to release, and are interested in tools to help this happen more often. Whether as a full-time position or just because they are helpful, all projects have toolsmiths: making choices about tools, installing them, and then maintaining the tools that everyone else depends upon. This book is especially for everyone who ends up being a toolsmith for his or her group.
This book doesn’t tell you how to write faster code, or how to write code with fewer memory leaks, or even how to debug code at all. What it does tell you is how to build your product in better ways, how to keep track of the code that you write, and how to track the bugs in your code. Plus some more things you’ll wish you had known before starting a project.
Practical Development Environments is a guide, a collection of advice about real development environments for small to medium-sized projects and groups. Each of the chapters considers a different kind of tool - tools for tracking versions of files, build tools, testing tools, bug-tracking tools, tools for creating documentation, and tools for creating packaged releases. Each chapter discusses what you should look for in that kind of tool and what to avoid, and also describes some good ideas, bad ideas, and annoying experiences for each area. Specific instances of each type of tool are described in enough detail so that you can decide which ones you want to investigate further.
Developers want to write code, not maintain makefiles. Writers want to write content instead of manage templates. IT provides machines, but doesn’t have time to maintain all the different tools. Managers want the product to move smoothly from development to release, and are interested in tools to help this happen more often. Whether as a full-time position or just because they are helpful, all projects have toolsmiths: making choices about tools, installing them, and then maintaining the tools that everyone else depends upon. This book is especially for everyone who ends up being a toolsmith for his or her group.
About the Author
Matthew Doar has been a professional toolsmith and software developer for over ten years at a number of different companies. He wrote this book because he was frustrated with the lack of books about how to create good software development environments. He also wrote JDiff, an open source tool for comparing the APIs of different versions of large Java projects. He has a Ph.D. in computer networking from the University of Cambridge.
What This Book Is About
A development environment is the whole collection of tools that people use to create software, not just a few tools that are specific to a particular programming language. Examples of these tools are version control tools such as CVS, build tools such as make, and bug tracking tools such as Bugzilla. Practical development environments are the environments that are really used by successful projects, and are consequently reused for many different projects. Just as there is a wide range of productivity for different programmers, there is a wide range of productivity for different projects, and that’s often due to differences in development environments.
This book is a guidea collection of advice about real development environments. Each of the core chapters considers a different kind of tool: tools for tracking versions of files, build tools, testing tools, bug tracking tools, and tools for creating documentation. Each chapter discusses what you should look for in each kind of tool and what to avoid, and also describes some good ideas, bad ideas, and annoyances for each development activity. Specific instances of each type of tool are described in detail so that you can decide which ones you want to investigate further.
The tools described in this book are mostly intended for small to medium-sized projects, up to around 200 developers. However, the concepts and concerns described in each chapter are equally valid for large projects. One of the key ideas throughout this book is to automate wherever possible, and this becomes even more important as a project grows.
Finally, this book recognizes that some progress is better than none, and encourages you to take even the smallest steps to improve your own development environment.
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Tags: Programming, Software Development