Despite knowing the recipe won’t you prefer somebody else cook it for you?

If you are like me you will answer positively to that question. By bringing the similarity between cooking and programming I wish to establish my point how distorted results one can get from the cooks (hacks) all over on the Internet.

The convention I am establishing is that the ready to employ code is compared to the prepared meal and the concepts and mechanisms to the recipes.

The contradiction comes when everybody agrees that people will prefer the meal versus the recipe and still a very few are describing the recipe. By describing the recipe one can imply fundamental directions in the spirit of self-help culture and not holding someone hand by supplying step-by-step instructions. I will provide an example below in order to clarify what fundamental directions one can expect to discover.

So like everything in life you will be a lucky if you filter the white noise of the hacks and find real authors, who altruistically provide contents outside their books. This means that in the same manner as in their books, their writings come with bibliography and other references and sometimes with personal experience.

To get the taste of writing I am describing try Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary. Also the early days of Joel Spolsky blogging are a good example as well.

Here is the example I mentioned earlier. Let’s assume you research a way to implement drag-and-drop functionality over the desktop shortcut of your program. The results should be structured around the fundamental understanding, from where going to the particular understanding will be very easy. In other words one should look how chosen OS reacts when a file is dropped – first it opens linked executable and second it signals to the application to open the dropped file. The signal from OS usually comes via command-line methods and the research is narrowed dramatically. One only has to look how the IDE deals with such methods and research which one to choose to implement in the particular application. Finally the hint has to lay on the application creation event. The research is done and the rest is matter of typing the code.

Of course if such writing concludes with complete reference list about the books or articles supporting author’s idea, then you have a complete recipe, which definitely will satisfy your appetite.