Guides are documents that contain answers to questions you will encounter while you develop your applications. Some of those questions will be what should I use to prompt a user for input, and others suggest what is the best way to communicate your intent of the code you are writing so that it is easier for the next person to maintain.
Each of guide you use will affect your coding style and how you view problems, so make sure you review a variety of guides. By examining many coding-style of guides, you can learn from others and see how they saw the best way to communicate intent to other developers. For example, an excellent way to show what you intend for a method to do is to name it with a name that reflects that intent.
Bad
function FindSomething()
Good
function ProductExists()
FindSomething is vague and leads to more questions as to what is the function trying to find, where as with ProductExists gives us a clearer message.
Here a few coding guides to help you learn ways of communicating your intent to other developers:
- Clean,
high quality code: a guide on how to become a better programmer - Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide
- C# Coding Conventions
The guides listed are not the only kind of guides out there that you will want to be familiar with. You will want to be familiar with style guides, UX guides, security coding guides, to name a few. If you do not have a coding guide look at a few existing ones and pick one that you agree with, if you do have one go and review it and make sure you are following it.
