Why You Should Learn to Read Code

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From the course by Duke University

Programming Fundamentals

357 ratings

Duke University

Programming Fundamentals

357 ratings

Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Introduction to Programming in C

Programming is an increasingly important skill, whether you aspire to a career in software development, or in other fields. This course is the first in the specialization Introduction to Programming in C, but its lessons extend to any language you might want to learn. This is because programming is fundamentally about figuring out how to solve a class of problems and writing the algorithm, a clear set of steps to solve any problem in its class. This course will introduce you to a powerful problem-solving process—the Seven Steps—which you can use to solve any programming problem. In this course, you will learn how to develop an algorithm, then progress to reading code and understanding how programming concepts relate to algorithms.

From the lesson

Reading Code

In this module, you will learn to read code—this means you will be able to execute a piece of code by hand, and clearly illustrate what each statement does and what the state of the program is. Understanding how to read code is the only way to be sure you can write correct code. By the end of this module, you will be able to read and understand code with functions, conditional statements, iteration, and other fundamental techniques.

Why You Should Learn to Read Code2:58

Declaring and Assigning a Variable2:19

Examples of Expressions2:18

Meet the Instructors

Andrew D. Hilton
Associate Professor of the Practice
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Genevieve M. Lipp
Adjunct Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering/Mechanical Engineering
Anne Bracy
Senior Lecturer
Computer Science, Cornell University

In this module, you will learn to read code and execute it by hand.

Why would you want to do this when you could take a quick syntax lesson and

start typing?

Think for a moment about when you were first learning about written language.

Did you learn to write before you could read?

Probably not, recognizing a word or sentence and

attaching meaning is easier than formulating your own.

You've probably misspelled a word or

made a grammatical error expressing an idea that you could read just fine.

Programming is much like this, you need to read for understanding and understand

exactly how code is executed before you can write good code of your own.

It's also easier, reading well will help you make fewer mistakes as you go, but

also help you troubleshoot when your code does something you did not expect.

My background is in mechanical engineering, and

in my undergraduate program, we used MATLAB for computational tasks.

Despite excellent instruction and

thoughtful exercises, many students, myself included,

would spend hours debugging code, mostly by guessing and checking.

Never once did I draw a picture of what I thought was happening, or

execute even a line of code by hand.

And I probably couldn't have,

because there were a few things I didn't understand fully.

While teaching, I've seen students make similar mistakes.

Finding the cause of an error message is a treasure hunt, one that might take much

longer than someone spent writing the code in the first place.

Often, we know what we want a section of code to be doing, maybe even what we think

it's doing, but unless you can be sure, you cannot be confident in your result.

And you'll likely spend more time debugging than you want to.

Here's an algorithm for a function we'll talk about later in the course.

You can see here that each step of the algorithm

changes something about the state of the program.

Here are the same steps implemented in code.

Do not worry if you do not know how to read this yet.

The point is that the code needs to change the program

in the exact same way as your algorithm.

If the code is doing something different,

we need to change it to match the algorithm.

This is why learning to read code is so important for writing it.

In this module, you'll learn to understand what statements do.

Both the syntax, or grammar of a language, and

the semantics, or meaning a statement has.

You'll also learn how to keep track of the state of a program, where you are, and

what functions can see which variables.

To do this, you will learn how to draw pictures of exactly what is happening

according to a set of rules.

Once you can do these things, writing code will come easier.

And when you do have a situation when your code does not do what you expect,

you'll have a set of tools you can use to investigate your program to see what it is

doing.

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