Best Practices of Spell Design

by Jeremy Kubica

A tale of programming and software best practices from the Computational Fairy Tales universe.In all his years as a wizard, Marcus has never seen a spell cause this much damage. When Hannaldous's sloppy attempt at a shield spell accidentally curses the castle, the walls start crumbling at an alarming rate. Now Marcus and his apprentice Shelly must figure out how to repair the damage before the castle turns to dust. Along the way they will encounter gossiping worms, perfectionist bakers, opportunistic rabbits, and copious amounts of mold.The Best Practices of Spell Design introduces practical aspects of software development that are often learned through painful experience. Through Marcus and Shelly’s quest, the story encourages readers to think about how to write readable, well-tested and maintainable programs. Readers will discover the importance of comments in recipes, the value of testing potions, the dangers of poorly named ingredients, the wonders of code reviews in magic libraries, and the perils of premature optimization.

Genres: Computer Science, Fantasy, Computers, Fiction, Technology, Programming

138 pages, Paperback

First published January 21, 2013

Reviews

[Daniel Hickman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Would recommend to any new coder! And anyone interested in software development. I read it while taking my first Computer Science class and it really helped ingrain good practices in my mind. I credit this book in large part to why my code is so neat and well-commented :D Anyway, it's a fun read and I love seeing how they creatively use the medieval-fantasy setting (and honestly, if magic were real it'd probably look a lot like this lol)

[Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty heavy-handed on equating magic spells (and muffin recipes) to writing code.

Even so, a good story that hangs together and teaches (harps on?) good coding practices.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I liked the story of this book I liked "computational fairytales" better. In "computational fairytales" the story and content were more subtle connected, which I personally liked more. However I still like the general idea of the books.

[Abe H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading for school
it was fine but id rather have a version that was just the advice without the stories to reference to.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun read for people familiar with or learning the principles of programming.