Chapter 4: Coding Defensively

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A defender must always seek to change over to the attack as soon as he has gained the benefit of the defense.

—Carl von Clausewitz

Overview

This is a book about going beyond coding, but there are still parts of coding that I want to talk about. In particular, when you start writing code that you intend to develop and maintain for the long run, you need to pay attention to defensive coding. When you get into a defensive coding mindset, you recognize that despite your best efforts, your code is going to have some problems and will need to be modified. The goal of defensive coding is to write code that makes it easy to find problems and make any necessary modifications.

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