Clean code thrilled

This afternoon I received a parcel from Amazon with the two books I had ordered:

• Test-Driven Development By Example by Kent Beck.
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftmanship by Robert C. Martin.

I'm thrilled, I've just read Clean Code's first chapter and I'm already loving it. 

I'm looking forward to read the rest of the book.

Watched at work: "Parallel Programming Patterns", "PatternCraft: Command Pattern" and "Code Smell oOf The Week: Long Methods"

These are the last videos we watched in our weekly videolecture session:

• Codemanships's Code Smell oOf The Week: Long Methods
• PatternCraft: Command Pattern
• Parallel Programming Patterns: Data Parallelism talk by Ralph Johnson.

Revisiting Introduction to Algorithms

I'd like to add some information to my recent post about MIT Introduction to Algorithms course.

Peteris Krumins followed this course online some time ago and posted his personal notes for every lecture in his interesting blog: Good coders code, great reuse.

Learning TDD

TDD stands for Test-driven development and quoting the Wikipedia definition is

"a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a desired improvement or new function, then produces code to pass that test and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards".

I've been hearing a lot about it since I started programming again. That aroused my curiosity and I'd like to learn how to use it.

These are the resources that I plan to use:

• I've ordered Test Driven Development: By Example, a book written by Kent Beck.
• I've found a wonderful series of videos by James Shore: Let's play: TDD.
• There's also a book in Spanish about TDD written by Carlos Ble that you can download for free: Diseño ágil con TDD.

Software Carpentry version 4

Some time ago I posted about Software Carpentry.

Software carpentry is a wonderful initiative to teach scientists and engineers the concepts, skills, and tools that will help them use and build software more productively.

I recently revisited the Software Carpentry site, and they have released the version 4.

These are the lectures in this last version:

• Version Control
• The Shell
• Python
• Testing
• Sets and Dictionaries
• Regular Expressions
• Databases
• Classes and Objects
• Program Design
• Systems Programming
• Make
• Matrix Programming
• MATLAB
• Multimedia Programming
• Spreadsheets
• Essays
• Recommended Reading
• Glossary

All the lectures are freely available under a Creative Commons license.