Gain insights into launching your software career, managing development processes, and understanding the big picture to confidently advance in the industry faster than your peers.

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This course focuses on how to kickstart your career in the software industry and how to manage various operational and development processes. This is an excellent overview of the “big picture” and the many facets of software development that a lot of new developers lack. A great primer for starting an exciting career in software development.

By the end of this course, you will be able to confidently go into the workforce and make strides in your career quicker than your fellow peers.

New Programmer's Survival Manual

# Know the Platform
Let’s consider a handful of platforms and how to get started in each. You’ll notice big differences in the workflow and programming style they demand. If possible, find a mentor who knows the platforms and who can help you program idiomatically.

 To warm up, handle the console interface first. Get the program logic into shape on the simplest possible platform, a console application. This requires only one program file and no GUI beyond `printf()`. We can pick any language we like, but we’ll discuss C in this section.

The objective is the classic Fahrenheit/Celsius converter. Feel free to do anything different. Here’s a quick specification:

* The user should be able to specify the conversion as command-line arguments, `-c` (degrees Celsius) or `-f` (degrees Fahrenheit).

* If no arguments are supplied, the program should prompt the user for degrees and units.

* If the user provides arguments that cannot be converted meaningfully (non-numeric, out of range), the program needs to detect that and print an appropriate message.

This is mostly a warm-up exercise so you don’t get bogged down in the platform itself, but even a simple console application is built on a platform. In this case, it’s your C compiler and the C standard library. On Unix-like platforms, you can display your application’s dependencies with this:

`ldd [program]`

You should see something like `libc`. This is a shared library that’s used to provide the C standard library for all programs running on your machine.


## Desktop GUI

From here things can diverge quickly depending on your preferred operating system. Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and others evolved with separate GUI programming interfaces, so creating a native application means learning a separate toolkit for each. In the case of Mac OS, it requires learning a new programming language, too: Objective-C.

There are also ways to create cross-platform GUI programs using a framework like **Qt** or a platform like Java.

Here’s a specification for your GUI temperature converter:

* The program should display a window with a text field, a drop-down box for conversion, and a second text field for the conversion result.

 * The first text field should be editable but allow only digits, decimal points, and plus and minus signs.

* The second text field should not be editable; it should be used only for the program’s display.

* If the temperature entered is out of range, an error dialog should tell the user why and clamp the entered value to the closest valid temperature.

* **Bonus points:** The conversion result field should update as the user types each character.

* In your code, separate the conversion code from the code handling the GUI widgets and events.

The first thing to note is there’s no `main()` function where you wait for the user to type something. Instead, you get events from on-screen widgets when the user clicks or types something. This programming style will probably feel strange because you’re not driving the program flow; the user is.

The second thing is the two-step process where you build the graphical part of the GUI first and then add the code that makes it go. This separates the view from the model. The model is all our “business logic,” which in this case isn’t much.

Getting Started

Program for Production

Getting Our Tools in Order

Be Your Own Manager

Team Work

Inside the Company

Mind Your Business

Kaizen

Conclusion

Suggested Actions Part 2

Know the Platform