13.1 The Art of Program Design

My emphasis on the art of program design has determined the way in which the programs were presented. They've generally progressed from a discussion of problems and ideas, to pseudocode, to small groups of small, cooperating subroutines, and finally to a close-up discussion of the code. At several points you've seen more than one way to do the same task. This is an important part of a programmer's mindset: the knowledge of, and willingness to try, alternatives.

The other recurrent theme has been to explain the problem-solving strategies programmers rely on. These include knowing how to use such sources of information as searchable newsgroup archives, books, and language documentation; having a good working knowledge of debugging tools; and understanding basic algorithm and data structure design and analysis.

As your skills improve, and your programs become more complex, you'll find that these strategies take on a much more important role. Designing and coding programs to solve complex problems or crunch lots of complex data requires advanced problem-solving strategies. So it's worth your while to learn to think like a computer scientist as well as a biologist.