Have You Ever Wondered

From APIDesign

Many people want to know, before they start to read a book, whether it can help them solve some problems. That is very likely reason why many books start with have you ever wondered sections. TheAPIBook does not contain such section itself, however that in no way means that there are not problems that it helps solve! You can bet that there is a lot of them! TheAPIBook is a lab journal describing adventures of NetBeans project and as such, it is almost completely stuffed with problem solutions. Here is short have you ever wondered section to demonstrate that.

Have you read many books about design? Have you read some? Do you think you know everything about proper design? Are you asking why bother with yet another design book? The prologue shows you that you should care. Most design books are written for "in-house" development, however with the rise of code reuse caused mostly by proliferation of various open source libraries and frameworks, we are entering world of distributed development. The new coding life style needs slightly different designing approach. After reading prologue, you'll find out that you need TheAPIBook if you want to code software for the 21st century.

Have you ever considered yourself artist when coding? Do you think programming is kind of art? Have you noticed the difference in developing software systems today and twenty years ago? Do you know why people consider ugly solutions wrong? If you ever asked questions like this, the chapter 1 gives you answers that I found after many years of oscillating between feeling like artist and behaving as engineer. Did you ever hopelessly searched for new programmers? We do it all the time and it looks like we are constantly running out of good programmers. But how good a programmers has to be to produce good software? Maybe it is enough if one can code HTML.