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Why You Should Learn to Read Code

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Programming Fundamentals

Duke University

4.7 (1,406 ratings) | 41K Students Enrolled

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

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.

Skills You'll Learn

Algorithms, Programming Language Concepts, Problem Solving, C Programming

Reviews

4.7 (1,406 ratings)

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SS

Apr 21, 2019

I love the focus of this first course in the specialization is about problem solving and developing a mindset for programming. The course is well thought out and concepts are clearly explained!

AM

Apr 08, 2019

Really great course. Took this as a refresher. I feel that the content of this course was significantly higher quality than the programming tuition I received in first semester of university.

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

Taught By

Andrew D. Hilton
Associate Professor of the Practice
Genevieve M. Lipp
Assistant Professor of the Practice
Anne Bracy
Senior Lecturer

Transcript

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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