I am now writing Java code (hooray for me) and playing around with Ant as part of my work. It isn't entirely tout le monde type stuff but it isn't anything spectacular. Yet. So, to my (much disappointed) audience, I ask, how does one go about learning about any system that is full of things one has little idea of? I learn by trying things and documenting them... but where do I start? From top down? From bottom up? What if I don't know where the bottom is?
Also what are the rules about changing someone else's work? Do you just go ahead and change things willy-nilly? Is there such a thing as respecting someone else's creations and working around them?
Oh, so many questions!
Also what are the rules about changing someone else's work? Do you just go ahead and change things willy-nilly? Is there such a thing as respecting someone else's creations and working around them?
Oh, so many questions!
2 comments:
Great that you are developing. The best way to learn something in my opinion is to pick a workflow and trace through it in an IDE debugger to get a good idea of what's really happening. You can't document it if you don't know what it's doing. Start from the beginning so you get the entry points, then go thru each business process one at a time.
There are no rules for changing someone else's work, as long as you understand the work - no code is sacred - it may have been the best solution at the time it was written, but that doesn't make it the best solution now. It's not art, it's functional, so respecting their vision has no place. Happy coding!
On a related note, is there a way to get all the dependencies for an ant XML file drawn out in some graphical form?
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