Best Coding Practices

Within these castle walls be forged Mavens of Computer Science ...

— Merlin, The Coder

Best Practice

👍 #249

Flowcharts are your friend

Best Practice

👍 #657

Use appropriate capitalization

• Names of types and protocols are UpperCamelCase (Pascal case)
• Everything else is lowerCamelCase

Best Practice

👍 #359

Clarity is more important than brevity

Best Practice

👍 #563

Preconditions are your friend

• Include sufficient information for the message to be useful

Best Practice

👍 #174

Great functions exhibit these three vital properties:

• Easy to read and comprehend
• Easy to debug
• Easy to modify to solve a variation of the original task

Best Practice

👍 #057

No global variables

• Global variables are evil

Best Practice

👍 #207

Always use appropriate and descriptive variable names

• nouns are usually most appropriate

Best Practice

👍 #208

Always use appropriate and descriptive function names

• verbs are usually most appropriate

Best Practice

👍 #394

Orderly exits from functions

• In general, avoid mid-function exits

Best Practice

👍 #444

Avoid repetition

• DRY: Do Not Repeat Yourself
• DIE: Duplication is Evil

Best Practice

👍 #502

Scope appropriately

• Scope is no wider than absolutely necessary

Best Practice

👍 #523

Loop appropriately

• Correct loop type
• In general, avoid mid-loop exits

Best Practice

👍 #029

Always use appropriate indentation

• Helpful white space
• Appropriate placement of closing braces and parentheses

Best Practice

👍 #074

Use comments to advantage others

• Deliberate and helpful comments
• Avoid "obvious" comments

Best Practice

👍 #617

Nest appropriately

• Avoid deep nesting
• Avoid inappropriate nesting of functions
• Indent correctly according to nested level

Best Practice

👍 #831

Limit line length

Best Practice

👍 #907

Organize files appropriately

• Generally one class per file

Best Practice

👍 #947

Hardcode only when there is no other choice

• All other values should be one of the following:
  • Calculated
  • Retrieved from configuration

Best Practice

👍 #959

Do not place extraneous files into source control

• Exclude all build artifacts
• Exclude any "backup" files (e.g. main.swift~)

Exercises

Exercises

•  M1297-28  Complete  Merlin Mission Manager  Mission M1297-28.

References

• API Design Guidelines (Swift Documentation)
• API Style Guidelines (Google Documentation)