What s in a Name?

What's in a Name ?

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less."

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Scattered throughout the book you'll find various bits of jargoneither perfectly good English words that have been corrupted to mean something technical, or horrendous made-up words that have been assigned meanings by computer scientists with a grudge against the language. The first time we use each of these jargon words, we try to define it, or at least give a hint to its meaning. However, we're sure that some have fallen through the cracks, and others, such as object and relational database, are in common enough usage that adding a definition would be boring. If you do come across a term you haven't seen before, please don't just skip over it. Take time to look it up, perhaps on the Web, or maybe in a computer science textbook . And, if you get a chance, drop us an e-mail and complain, so we can add a definition to the next edition.

Having said all this, we decided to get revenge against the computer scientists. Sometimes, there are perfectly good jargon words for concepts, words that we've decided to ignore. Why? Because the existing jargon is normally restricted to a particular problem domain, or to a particular phase of development. However, one of the basic philosophies of this book is that most of the techniques we're recommending are universal: modularity applies to code, designs, documentation, and team organization, for instance. When we wanted to use the conventional jargon word in a broader context, it got confusingwe couldn't seem to overcome the baggage the original term brought with it. When this happened , we contributed to the decline of the language by inventing our own terms.

Source Code and Other Resources

Most of the code shown in this book is extracted from compilable source files, available for download from our Web site:

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com

There you'll also find links to resources we find useful, along with updates to the book and news of other Pragmatic Programmer developments.

Send Us Feedback

We'd appreciate hearing from you. Comments, suggestions, errors in the text, and problems in the examples are all welcome. E-mail us at

ppbook@pragmaticprogrammer.com

Acknowledgments

When we started writing this book, we had no idea how much of a team effort it would end up being.

Addison-Wesley has been brilliant , taking a couple of wet-behind-the-ears hackers and walking us through the whole book-production process, from idea to camera-ready copy. Many thanks to John Wait and Meera Ravindiran for their initial support, Mike Hendrickson, our enthusiastic editor (and a mean cover designer!), Lorraine Ferrier and John Fuller for their help with production, and the indefatigable Julie DeBaggis for keeping us all together.

Then there were the reviewers: Greg Andress, Mark Cheers, Chris Cleeland, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, Thanh T. Giang, Robert L. Glass, Scott Henninger, Michael Hunter, Brian Kirby, John Lakos, Pete McBreen, Carey P. Morris, Jared Richardson, Kevin Ruland, Eric Starr, Eric Vought, Chris Van Wyk, and Deborra Zukowski. Without their careful comments and valuable insights, this book would be less readable, less accurate, and twice as long. Thank you all for your time and wisdom.

The second printing of this book benefited greatly from the eagle eyes of our readers. Many thanks to Brian Blank, Paul Boal, Tom Ekberg, Brent Fulgham, Louis Paul Hebert, Henk-Jan Olde Loohuis, Alan Lund, Gareth McCaughan, Yoshiki Shibata, and Volker Wurst, both for finding the mistakes and for having the grace to point them out gently.

Over the years , we have worked with a large number of progressive clients , where we gained and refined the experience we write about here. Recently, we've been fortunate to work with Peter Gehrke on several large projects. His support and enthusiasm for our techniques are much appreciated.

This book was produced using LATEX, pic, Perl, dvips, ghostview, ispell , GNU make, CVS, Emacs, XEmacs, EGCS, GCC, Java, iContract, and SmallEiffel, using the Bash and zsh shells under Linux. The staggering thing is that all of this tremendous software is freely available. We owe a huge "thank you" to the thousands of Pragmatic Programmers worldwide who have contributed these and other works to us all. We'd particularly like to thank Reto Kramer for his help with iContract.

Last, but in no way least, we owe a huge debt to our families. Not only have they put up with late night typing, huge telephone bills, and our permanent air of distraction, but they've had the grace to read what we've written, time after time. Thank you for letting us dream.

Andy Hunt

Dave Thomas



The Pragmatic Programmer(c) From Journeyman to Master
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
ISBN: 020161622X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 81

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