Educate your friend via:

Difficulty: easy moderate challenging

In this article I will explore the usage of properties in order to simplify, bulletproof, and even better encapsulate your code. These are not merely slogans. By the advanced use of properties [and categories], you’ll see how we save coding time, write less implementation details, make our code less error-prone, and make other classes who use our class more independent.

 

The standard use of properties: to create fields your and other classes can modify and access was thoroughly explained in my previous post: What are Properties and how do they work?. Instead, in this article, we’ll deal with three distinct types of variable usages, whose names I made up, and standardize their implementation using properties. We’ll start with Internal Variables – variables that are to be used only within our implementation, we’ll continue to Seemingly Read-Only Variables – variables that are read-only to all classes but our implementation – and lastly, we’ll discuss General-Specific Variables – variables that are exposed to other classes as a superclass of what they are, whom merits will be explained. We trouble ourselves with coding these cases using properties in order to exclude any implementation details from our code, for instance, by not using retain or release at all. Plus, since the memory options of properties (retain, assign, and copy) are easily changeable from one to another, it will allow for faster and less-buggy code changes later.

Educate your friend via:

Difficulty: easy moderate challenging

The main task of a programmer is not simply to create code that works, but perhaps even more important, to create code that’s manageable, adaptable to new requirements, and allows easy debugging. These qualifications are intended to help programmers, either the original coder or his or her colleagues, to better support the code; the CPU doesn’t need any help – it knows precisely how to handle all instructions, be them cluttered or neat. So, to be able to support those requirements, we strive to divide big chunks of code into separate files, functions, and lines.