Think Like a Programmer

When you allow yourself to get frustrated—and I use the word “allow” deliberately—you are, in effect, giving yourself an excuse to continue to fail.

You should think of this book as an obstacle course for your brain. Obstacle courses build strength, stamina, and agility and give the trainer confidence. By reading through the chapters and applying the concepts to as many exercises as you can, you’re going to build confidence and develop problem-solving skills that can be used in any programming situation. In the future, when you are faced with a difficult problem, you’ll know whether you should try going over, under, or through it.

We will call the missing skill problem solving, the ability to take a given problem description and write an original program to solve it.

Remember that some problems, like our sliding tile puzzle, often hide their potential subdivision. Sometimes the way to find a problem’s divisions is to reduce the problem, as we’ll discuss shortly.

Also, restating the problem may be a necessary prerequisite step to using other common techniques, like reducing or dividing the problem.

Even if a restatement doesn’t lead to any immediate insight, it can help in other ways.

Restating a problem is like circling the base of a hill that you must climb; before starting your climb, why not check out the hill from every angle to see whether there’s an easier way up?

Restatement sometimes shows us the goal was not what we thought it was.

Planning also allows you to set intermediate goals and achieve them. Without a plan, you have only one goal: solve the whole problem. Until you have solved the problem, you won’t feel you have accomplished anything.

the Prussian Helmuth von Moltke, famously said that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy”). But no army can succeed without planning and organization. Through planning, a general learns what his army’s capabilities are, how the different parts of the army work together, and so on.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower was famous for saying, “I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”