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swcarpentry / good-enough-practices-in-scientific-computing

Minimalist alternatives to "best practices" paper
https://swcarpentry.github.io/good-enough-practices-in-scientific-computing/
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references for Software section #170

Closed kcranston closed 7 years ago

kcranston commented 7 years ago

One reviewer points out that there are thousands of books and articles on how to write / structure source code and that we should be clear that this section reiterates existing advice. I am soliciting your favourite references for writing, organizing, and sharing scripts and programs.

jkitzes commented 7 years ago

Off the top of my head, I would list Clean Code and Beautiful Code, then maybe a book on software design patterns (no particular favorite).

jennybc commented 7 years ago

The Pragmatic Programmer?

lexnederbragt commented 7 years ago

+1 to Clean Code (https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882), but not based on personal experience, only because it is used by a bioinformaticians group here.

gvwilson commented 7 years ago

I'm less enamored of Pragmatic Programmer and Clean Code than I was a decade ago, primarily because their authors have often been in the "evidence? we don't need no stinkin' evidence!" camp. And while I'm fond of Beautiful Code, I think it's too wide-ranging for our intended audience.

The one I keep coming back to is Code Complete - it's well organized, and full of references to empirical studies (rather than just the author's opinions). It is pretty thick, though, so Pragmatic Programmer as a smaller second choice maybe?

tracykteal commented 7 years ago

+1 for Pragmatic Programmer. @ctb and @ethanwhite might also have thoughts.

gvwilson commented 7 years ago

Reference to PragProg now included.

kcranston commented 7 years ago

Re-opening this, because we still have a comment in the ms requesting refs. I see the hunt reference attached to the specific recommendation in the previous sentence, but reviewer 1 is specifically asking for references to some of the "thousands of books and millions of articles on the subject", i.e. for our phrase "Much has been written on this topic..." and I don't think the single ref to hunt is sufficient.

jkitzes commented 7 years ago

@kcranston I take it we can close this one now given #189?