Electronic Archaeology
by Derrick StoryNetwork Newsletter for 04/29/2003
Dear Readers,
For most programmers, what they learned in college about code structure and the process for project development (such as Extreme Programming) has little bearing on the reality of their professional life. Often journeymen programmers find themselves assigned to projects that are older than their "beginning programming" textbooks, and have been tampered with by a variety of past employees who did not document their additions, or for that matter, even add comments to the code. What a mess!
O'Reilly book author Steve Oualline knows all about this situation, and has spent a great deal of time refining the art of digging through ancient, muddled code. He calls this endeavor "Electronic Archaeology."
In his article by the same title, Steve shares with you eight of the best tools for digging through incomprehensible blobs of bad code. This writing could be the "Lost Ark" for programmers buried beneath ancient projects long ago rejected by those who have more seniority.
You might want to explore this one....
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Until next week,
Derrick
Derrick Story
O'Reilly Network Technical Editor
derrick@oreilly.com
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Electronic Archaeology
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incomprehensible blobs. The art of digging through ancient, muddled
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