Re: Common Beginner Mistakes

[Dominus]

Great article, thanks. A lot of this is really excellent advice.

Interested persons might want to take a look at my "red flags" articles, which are in a similar vein: "If you find yourself writing code like this, try to change it so that it looks like this instead."

• Program Repair Shop and Red Flags
• Return of Program Repair Shop and Red Flags
• Program Repair Shop and Red Flags 3
• Reader Comments on Red Flags
• Program Repair Shop and Red Flags at the Open Source Conferences

Briefly, a red flag is an early warning sign that you might be doing something wrong in your program. Whenever you see a red flag, you should pause and wonder if there isn't a better way to accomplish the same thing.

chromatic's Repetition Without Abstraction is a great example of this; I think in one of the articles I called it "The Red Flag of All Red Flags" or something.

Thanks again for a great post.