Monday, October 6, 2014

New Pluralsight Course: Abstract Art: Getting Things "Just Right"

I'm happy to announce that my latest Pluralsight course has just been published: Abstract Art: Getting Things "Just Right" (Pluralsight link).

I've been talking and writing about this topic for quite a while, so I was glad for the chance to put everything down in one place. I'm a big fan of the proper use of abstraction. When we use it correctly, it can make our applications easier to extend, maintain, and test.

And many of the techniques of abstraction took me a long time to grab on to when I was a young programmer. To save other developers from having to go through that struggle, I often talk about Interfaces, Design Patterns, and Dependency Injection.

And used properly, these things are really awesome. But we can also take things too far. If we have too much abstraction in our code, then things get pretty awful. Our code can become overly complex, confusing to navigate, and difficult to debug.

Our goal is to find the balance. Part of this is to look at ourselves and see what our natural tendencies are. Does your nature lean toward over-abstraction? Does your nature lean toward under-abstraction? Once we recognize this, we can use it to our advantage to avoid the danger areas.

And the course is full of practical advice. There is no one right answer -- no particular abstraction technique that applies to every situation. So, we'll look at several principles that we can apply to our code. If we keep these in mind, then we'll be headed in the right direction.

So, let's build on the experience of this girl:


And get things "Just Right".

Happy Coding!

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