I am often times wondering how I can write cleaner better code that is effective, but not reeeeealy long. As a beginner this is something you wish you can do, but blow it off until you get better at programming feeling eventually you’ll “get it”.

Often times with beginners there might be code that looks like this.


While this may look odd there are plenty of examples of SIMILAR code in beginners. And as you have probably figured out an easy way to shorten the code would be to do this.


The code looks cleaner and slimmer and a little easier to understand. So I recommend to write cleaner looking code try to get rid of as many variables as you can, but be careful not to take away to many.

Again I just want to re-iterate my purpose for these types of posts is to help beginners in places I wanted/needed help on with I first started, and still need help on to some degree.

This place almost has a cult following.

The Problem newb Software Development Tutorials

As a person that has spent a lot of time on my own to learn software development, and pretty much anything beyond school, I have often seen that there is a HUGE lack of resources for the beginners. While there is some it isn’t very good at all, sorry. I have spent the last couple of years trying to learn C# and ASP.NET and only through hand holding of teachers and long exhaustive talks with people that know A LOT more than I do, have I been able to learn.

This to me shows one of two things that trouble me.

    1) The people that write content for beginners don’t know how to write content for beginners.
    2) The learning curve is EXTREMELY high for programming.

Personally, I think it is a mix between both. As some people get more advanced as developers they tend to talk and meet with people that know as much or more than them as developers and they start to grow. When this happens people tend to forget what it is like to be a beginner and try to throw to much at them at once without any thorough explanation at all.

This brings me to the point of my post. I plan to start doing more “technical” blogging about subjects I am learning in programming, but my goal is to write it so those that are beginners, much like I still am, will understand what is going on. This means no one line code snippets, but full methods/functions to long detailed explanations. These I believe add value and make things easier. Here is an example of what I mean code wise.

Instead of comparing a string to null or “” just use the String.IsNullOrEmpty(stringVariable); method. ( I have seen this and dismissed it because I don’t get it )

This is what I would do for a post or an explanation

Acceptable code:


Better code:

As you can see this will demonstrate through straight code what people usually do, then showing with full code what can be better to do. This however assumes you understand how you can use if statements with bools.