No one can disparage the ability to write good code. At its highest levels, it is an art.

But no one can confuse writing good code with developing good software. The differencein terms of challenges, skills, and compensationis immense.

Coder to Developer helps you excel at the many noncoding tasks entailed, from start to finish, in just about any successful development project. Whats more, it equips you with the mindset and selfassurance required to pull it all together, so that you see every piece of your work as part of a coherent process. Inside, youll find plenty of technical guidance on such topics as:

• Choosing and using a source code control system
• Code generation toolswhen and why
• Preventing bugs with unit testing
• Tracking, fixing, and learning from bugs
• Application activity logging
• Streamlining and systematizing the build process
• Traditional installations and alternative approaches

To pull all of this together, the author has provided the source code for Download Tracker, a tool for organizing your collection of downloaded code, thats used for examples throughout this book. The code is provided in various states of completion, reflecting every stage of development, so that you can dig deep into the actual process of building software. But youll also develop "softer" skills, in areas such as team management, open source collaboration, user and developer documentation, and intellectual property protection. If you want to become someone who can deliver not just good code but also a good product, this book is the place to start. If you must build successful software projects, its essential reading.

Synopsis
It's easy to develop programming skills - there are hundreds of books on languages and platforms - but it's hard to learn how to develop applications: those skills are related, but different. Poorly conceived software is difficult to maintain and incurs high costs for upgrading and downtime. To develop high-quality software, programmers need to fully grasp such skills as project planning, source code control, error handling strategies, working with and managing teams, documenting the application, developing a build process, and delivering the product. These techniques are language and platform neutral, but apply to all development environments.

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