There are three major staff costs in the life of an IT project - the specification and development of the system, the maintainance and upgrading of the system though its life, and the investment that's made in data entry and integrity through the life of the system. And although there's a lot of thought put into the cost of developing a new system, that element is actually the smallest of the three. Ongoing upgrade / repair / maintainaince ends up costing more that the initial development. And the user's work on the data will end up being a bigger investment than the other two elements put together.

So it is important - REALLY important - to write the initial code in such a way that it can easily be amended through its life, and in such a way that it puts the user experience and efficiency as high priorities in the implementation. And to assist with that, a coding standards document is an excellent starting point and set of guidelines.

We have such a set of standards for Perl on our web site (here). And haveing such standards is particularly important for Perl - you'll see why on the standards description.

A correspondent writes:

"I am an employee in a CMM level5 company and I am asked to create a document regarding PERL and UNIX(shell scripts) coding standard.I found your site very useful to draft a document regarding PERL coding standards. Can you please provide similar help for preparing UNIX(shell scripts)."

And my reply:

I'm glad you found our site useful with regards to setting of Perl standards; it's a language in which programmers can write code that is utterly unmaintainable, as well as really clear and clean code, and a good set of standards should be at the core of any organisation's Perl strategy.

With regards to Shell programming, we don't have a similar set of documents available. Shell programs are typically much shorter and the issues of maintaining medium size to large scripts are far less common. In addition, the number of overlapping facilities and ability to shorten code in shell to the point it becomes hard to understand is far less. There are also numerous different shells, with each really needing its own set.

I'm afraid I don't have the free time to simply sit down and draw up a standard document, but I would be happy to put a day aside under our "extra" training scheme that would allow you and me to draw up a set of such standards together. The cost of such a day is 350.00 pounds + UK VAT at 17.5%. There are further notes on these days at (here).

The offer of mine is a real bargain - an astonishing offer in fact. But that's because I really want to help encourage quality coding. Here at Well House Consultants, we'll train you on not only how to program in Perl / PHP / Python / Ruby / Tcl, but also how to make the very best of those languages in writing maintainable code, with reusable modules / packages to save recoding, and with major thought to the user experience too.
(written 2007-09-11)

 Q909 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Object Orientation: Composite Objects
  [477] Class, static and unbound variables - (2005-10-25)
  [592] NOT Gone phishing - (2006-02-05)
  [1348] Screw it or Glue it? Access to Object variables - a warning - (2007-09-12)
  [2170] Designing a heirarcy of classes - getting inheritance right - (2009-05-11)
  [2641] Object Oriented Programming in PHP - (2010-02-19)
  [2865] Relationships between Java classes - inheritance, packaging and others - (2010-07-10)
  [2922] Getting the OO design write - with PHP a example - (2010-08-14)
  [3142] Private and Public - and things between - (2011-01-22)
  [3152] Jargon busting - (2011-01-30)
  [3251] C++ - objects that are based on other objects, saving coding and adding robustness - (2011-04-17)
  [3609] How do classes relate to each other? Associated Classes - (2012-02-12)
  [3979] Extended and Associated objects - what is the difference - C++ example - (2013-01-18)
  [4377] Designing a base class and subclasses, and their extension, in C++ - (2015-01-01)
  [4394] Philosophy behind object design - and how I applied in to a Java example - (2015-01-14)
  [4450] Deciding whether to use parameters, conditional statements or subclasses - (2015-03-05)

Q904 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Analysing a Programming Task
  [747] The Fag Packet Design Methodology - (2006-06-06)
  [1513] Perl, PHP or Python? No - Perl AND PHP AND Python! - (2008-01-20)
  [1607] Learning to program in Perl - (2008-04-11)
  [1850] Daisy the Cow and a Pint of Ginger Beer - (2008-10-21)
  [1853] Well structured coding in Perl - (2008-10-24)
  [2327] Planning! - (2009-08-08)
  [2715] Uploading an image, document or pdf via a browser (php) - (2010-04-10)
  [2834] Teaching examples in Perl - third and final part - (2010-06-27)
  [3329] Perl from basics - (2011-06-20)
  [3366] Specification, Design, Implementation, Testing and Documentation - stages of a (Java) programming project - (2011-07-21)
  [3461] From flowchart to program - code design for the newcomer - (2011-09-29)
  [3895] Flowchart to program - learning to program with Well House - (2012-10-14)

P711 - An Introduction to Standards in Perl
  [242] Satisfaction of training - (2005-03-11)
  [668] Python - block insets help with documentation - (2006-04-04)
  [743] How to debug a Perl program - (2006-06-04)
  [945] Code quality counts - (2006-11-26)
  [965] KISS - one action per statement please - Perl - (2006-12-05)
  [1047] Maintainable code - some positive advice - (2007-01-21)
  [1221] Bathtubs and pecking birds - (2007-06-07)
  [1395] Dont just convert to Perl - re-engineer! - (2007-10-18)
  [1555] Advanced Python, Perl, PHP and Tcl training courses / classes - (2008-02-25)
  [1728] A short Perl example - (2008-07-30)
  [1863] About dieing and exiting in Perl - (2008-11-01)
  [2375] Designing your data structures for a robust Perl application - (2009-08-25)
  [2688] Security considerations in programming - what do we teach? - (2010-03-22)
  [2875] A long day in Melksham ... - (2010-07-17)
  [3398] Perl - making best use of the flexibility, but also using good coding standards - (2011-08-19)
  [4326] Learning to program - comments, documentation and test code - (2014-11-22)

A167 - Web Application Deployment - Shell Programming (bash)
  [63] Almost like old times - (2004-09-26)
  [64] Shell Script for CGI on the web - (2004-09-26)
  [749] Cottage industry or production line data handling methods - (2006-06-07)
  [827] No news is good news with Unix and Linux - (2006-08-10)
  [1287] Work and play at Well House Manor - Football and Shell Shortcuts - (2007-08-02)
  [1468] Lexical v Arithemetic testing, Bash and Perl - (2007-12-11)
  [1527] Selecting file names in a shell - one word or another - (2008-02-02)
  [1904] Ruby, Perl, Linux, MySQL - some training notes - (2008-11-23)
  [3791] The Kernel, Shells and Daemons. Greek Gods in computing - (2012-07-01)
  [4400] Commenting out an echo killed my bash backup script - (2015-01-19)
  [4487] Starting MySQL. ERROR! The server quit without updating PID file - how we fixed it. - (2015-05-06)
  [4584] Bash ... some new scripts to - handling user input - (2015-11-27)
  [4586] Extending your bash shell with aliases, functions and extra commands - (2015-11-28)
  [4587] shell - bash. Writing conditional tests and statements - the options available - (2015-11-28)

Back to Catching up on indexing our resources

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Evening, Devizes and Sells Green

Cash is not an acceptable way of paying
Wireless Internet Access at hotels - an update and some pitfalls
Evening, Devizes and Sells Green
Perl and Shell coding standards / costs of an IT project
Catching up on indexing our resources
Melksham Laundrette
Google, wwmdirectory, Freshwater, ATP - new scam?
Moving to Melksham? Househunting map.
Tk locks up - 100% c.p.u. on a simple program (Tcl, Perl, Python)