Re: Null exception error and general tidying of code..

From: Andrew Thompson (SeeMySites_at_www.invalid)
Date: 12/17/04 

Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 16:32:47 GMT

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 15:14:06 GMT, Patricia Shanahan wrote:

> Some time ago, I noted from postings here that a lot of
> beginning programming courses and books don't teach how to
> debug.

Wow.. You too? I thought it was just me. ;-)

>...Students are apparently supposed to work it out for
> themselves.

The time it takes to master a few simple investigative techniques
is far shorter than the time wasted in attempting to debug code
without them. I would estimate.
It takes less time for a beginner programmer to learn a few simple
debug techniques, than it takes to debug the first two programs.

> I wrote a web page describing one approach to debug that
> works for me:
> http://home.earthlink.net/~patricia_shanahan/debug/

Aha! I already link to your 'Starting Writing a Program'
page but was unaware of the debugging document.. though I
have certainly seen it before, I recognise that image.. anyway.

Would you consider a few tweaks to those two pages, and adding a third?
The changes I suggest are..
- HTML anchors to the major sections (possibly with index at top)
- Background color (hey it's the third millenium, and there
  are 16 777 216 of them, 262 144 of which are brighter than
  75% in the R,G & B components. ..Live a little. ;)
- The mark-up is very clean and uncluttered, but
  - It contains one or two unnecessary HTML 3.2 elements
    (They could be made 4.01 strict quite easily)
  - I have an external style *** for code examples that I could
    apply to your examples to make them smaller.
  - You seem to drop directly from <H3> to <H5>, it makes more sense
    to make them <H4> elements then style that down a little to taste.

The third page would be a simple index and description
of the pages rather than, this..
<http://home.earthlink.net/~patricia_shanahan/>

BTW - I did like the pics of your Dad, looking quite dapper. :-)

If you're up for suggestions, I could throw together some examples.
What do you say?

And finally.. nice to see you posting to the groups again,
you were almost a 'distant legend' when I first started actively
posting to the groups, but I know of you from having read a
great many of your posts in researching Java qns., and there is
always what people say about you ..and that 'other people'
(who shall remain nameless) should be 'more like you'. ;-) 

-- 
Andrew Thompson
http://www.PhySci.org/codes/  Web & IT Help
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http://www.LensEscapes.com/  Images that escape the mundane
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