Title : In Defense of Reading the [Fine] Manual

 
Date : 2008-06-27 
Code : 
InfoWorld's Tom Yager speaks <a href="http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/06/rtfm_good_advic.html">in favor of the RTFM approach</a> to learning new skills, arguing that the knowledge gleaned from cracking a manual only in search of a specific answer is eroding software quality. <i>"The reason is that developers don't allow themselves the time to look things up before they use them. Statement completion, context-sensitive help, generated code, unit testing, and automated analysis came about expressly to eliminate research and experimentation from the development cycle. The result, I think, speaks for itself. How many rookie coding blunders that lead to security vulnerabilities grow out of inadequately understood usage of a method or resource?"</i><br />	
			
			
 
# securitydot.net Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:07:19 +0000