Code1161 — Week7

IO, Refactoring, Recursion

OPEN DATA PROJECT

Lots of open urban data is available. Try:

Data.gov.au

Process

First, you need to care about something.

- pick a data set

- document it

- understand how it was collected

- explore it

-join it to another set (compare/contrast)

-find amazing insights

-communicate these insights

IO

Notes on working with other files:

Writing

Mode = “w” (open file in write mode)

e.g.

History_book = open(file_path, mode)

History_book.write(name + “ is cool”)

History_book.close()

(here history_book is the “file object”)

Reading

Mode = ‘r’

History_book = open(file_path, mode)

Response = history_book.read()

(in Linux everything is a file, it doesn’t matter if it’s .txt etc.)

REFACTORING

When you are writing code, you are building up “technical debt” — i.e. the longer you go, the more junk you’re building up.

Things to look out for:

DRY — Don’t Repeat Yourself

If you only write it once, you can only write it wrong once.

Major culprits when something goes wrong:

-repetition — obvious culprit

-inappropriate naming — e.g. names and content no longer matching

Think about what comments and names actually mean. What they actually are, not how it’s being used right now)

-bloated functions

-unnecessarily complicated code

-overly large pages

-lack of useful comments

• check if things are very stepped in/nested

(see also: “code smells” — signs something is off)

RECURSION

No, don’t call it “inception.”

A Kosch snowflake is a simple example.

TUTE

Ctrl+ / — comments stuff out

JSON xml’s cool young child. Object based file system.

http verbs “get” “post”

status codes:

404 — can’t find

200 — everything good

Response object : <response[200]>

API- “ application programmer interface”

The way that you would access somebody elses code