implementation

Implementation Patterns
$44.99
The book contains a number of low-level programming techniques for improving design of a program. Kent Beck is grand master of programming and a great communicator. If there is one thing you can learn from this book is to communicate design effectively with the code. The book is fairly concise and consists of ten chapters and 130 pages.

Due to his pioneering work in design patterns, Kent uses patterns to identify common programming techniques and similar to his extreme programming style for agile development he divides those techniques into values, principles and patterns. The values focus on high level goals such as communication, simplicity, flexibility. The principles focus on local consequences (minimize side-effect), DRY, keeping data/logic together, symmetry, decalartive (annotations), rate of change (Reuse/Release Equivalency Principle).


The chapter 5 describes different ways of organizing the code using classes, interfaces, versioned interface, abstract class, value object, etc. Kent shows importance of dependency inversion principle of coding to interfaces. He provides trade-offs between interfaces and abstract class such as change in implementation and change of the interface itself. One of the hardest thing in real world is progression of interfaces with new behavior and Kent describes versioned interface for it. Kent also encourages use of value or immutable objects to make the program side-effect free as in functional languages. He bemoans procedural interfaces due to temporal depdency they impose. Inheritance is also most difficult to get right, so Kent gives a lot of advice on that to make sure subclasses follow Liskov Substition Principle. Kent describes discourages use of conditional logic and encourags delegation technique based on polymorphism. He also shows pluggable selector briefly to implement plugin like behavior. Finally, he discourages of use of library classes with static methods and encourages use of instance methods.

The chapter 6 describes patterns for state such as access, variables, parameters, initializations, etc. Unlike functional languages that don't allow mutable state, imperative languages have to manage state that changes over time. Kent prefers indirect access to the state rather than direct especially when there is dependency between multiple pieces of data. Kent prefers keeping scope of variables local. This chapter also gives good advice on naming variables and parameters. Finally, this chapter describes techniques for eager and lazy initialization.

The chapter 7 describes patterns for control flow, methods and exceptions. In object oriented languages messages are fundamental mechanism for controlling workflow and communicating with the objects. Kent also describes technique for double dispatch (similar to visitor pattern) that provides polymorphic behavior but at the cost of additional coding and maintenance overhead. Other topics include providing guards, naming method and exception handling.

The chapter 8 describes how to divide logic into methods. The chapter describes composed method for calling other methods. It encourages use of symmetry and having same level of abstraction for called methods. Kent also shows use of Method object or Function object that mimics functional style of programming. This chapter also describes conversion methods, factory methods, getter/setter methods and advice of returning copy from the methods instead of internal references.

The chapter 9 describes collections such as arrays, lists, sets, map.

The final chapter describes how to evolve frameworks without breaking the applications. Kent borrows a lot of his experience from JUnit framework and Eclipse (his buddy Eric Gamma). One of interestic topic is how to use objects and the chapter provides three styles including instantiation, configuration and implmentation. Kent shows how implementation technique allow clients to implement a framework interface and extend behavior. Kent also describes trade-offs of extending interfaces and using specialized interfaces as used by AWT (LayoutManager2). The chapter also offers advice on use of internal classes by clients and how they can be instantiated using constructors, factories, etc.

This book shows a lot of techniques and patterns that most experienced programmers knowingly or unknowningly use on daily basis. Nevertheless, it helps to review these techniques and some trade-offs for them. Though, I wish the book gave a lot more examples and described antipatterns as I often found most of the topics a bit dull.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Implementation and Maintenance (Exam 70-431)
$279.00
Interactive Instructor-Based Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Implementation and maintenance (Exam 70-431) Video Training Course on DVD-ROM. Computer Based Training (CBT) and Video Based Training (VBT) have emerged as the premier training tools in recent years. KeyStone Self-Paced CBT/VBT courses are known for their high quality in-depth content. Compared to traditional training methods, KeyStone courses cost less and users can learn faster while taking advantage of some of the best trainers in the industry. They are easy to use, comfortable to follow, perfect for training at the office, on the road, or at home.

Ergonomic Programs That Work: Successful Business Implementation Profiles
$12.95
Ergonomic Programs That Work was produced by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration in 1998. The film discusses ergonomics in the workplace. It takes the viewer into the operations of four diverse businesses and shows how ergonomics are being implemented to make the environment more comfortable for the employees - resulting in less downtime due to injuries and greater productivity by the staff. This DVD has a runtime of approximately 21 minutes.

The Board-CEO Partnership in Leading Strategic Change Part 2: Board Involvement and Implementation
$59.95
Picking up where Part 1 in this CD-ROM series left off, this educational presentation describes how to implement change in your nonprofit. Board involvement is the key and nonprofit leadership expert Doug Eadie's in-depth guidance on the right (and wrong) ways to involve your board will help your board accept, and even welcome, the inevitable change that must occur in all organizations. Eadie also identifies the barriers and resistance that you are likely to encounter, making it easier to overcome them.