In school? Meet with your professors often.

I had a meeting with my instructor for Programming Systems, where my project partner castlez and I discussed our project with him: a Dungeons and Dragons app. castlez and I have been working at this project for a few weeks now, but haven't made huge leaps of progress (side project, in any case), and we were hoping to get some advice about general workflow, source-code management, object orientation and cohesion, and design tools.

What we got out of it was great advice that is going to help us keep motivated to work on this project: use CRC cards to design, code as late as possible, take on working roles that suit you best, and keep coding!

Getting to Commit to Git

I'm going to assume that if you're here, you have both a current version of Eclipse (Kepler!) and a GitHub account. But I'm also going to assume you haven't really done this before. I sure hadn't, and I had a few headaches. Let's begin the adventure...

Advanced Enums in OOP: Commands Made Easy

The idea of an enum is pretty easy: essentially to give a variable which has a fixed number of options. Common examples include a playing card's value, or its suit, or a genre of a movie.

But enums serve a greater purpose in OOP, especially in Java: creating advanced structures for multiple, nearly identical classes, in a consolidated way.

The perks of OOP

One of the biggest problems with procedural programming, and really with languages that are not object-oriented, is the huge amount of overhead created when working on a large scale. Indeed, object-oriented programming is almost entirely for the purpose of huge scalability.

Let's take an example...

Hello, World

I am enrolled in a number of classes as I earn a minor in computer science, and plan on extracting as much value as possible from them. One way of doing that is teaching. Since I learn most effectively when I process for teaching, I am going to use this blog as a medium for doing just that.

In subsequent posts you will see sample code uploaded, typically generated or received in class, with an explanation of its function, build and purpose. I also plan on discussing concepts that reach above coding, such as object-oriented programming techniques.

Let's see how it goes...