Welcome reader,

We’ll follow where we left off when we’ve talked about variables. When you are behind you screen, there is a lot more going on then just writing lines in the IDE to make you computer do something.  There are a set of rules that you should always stick to make your code clearer. Before, we talked about commenting your code.  Comments are meant to explain the purposes of your program. As an example,  when you’re creating variables, placing comments can help explain what you’re trying to do with those variables. When you’re programming, your instructions will be read by the IDE. Comments will be ignore by the IDE.

There are different ways to comment code. You can place comment on one line. You can also you what I call paragraph commenting. These will come handy when we’ll describe the behavior of methods. You’ll find some commenting examples.

//This is a single line comment

/*

This a paragraph comment. While I'm inside the /**/

all that will be written will be ignored by the IDE

*/

int myIntVariable; //Explain the usefulness of your variable with this comment 

More than just comments, there are other ways to make sure that other programmers who might read your code will appreciate reading it. As you could have seen, when I’m writting my variables, I follow a set of rules which I strongly suggest that you should also follow. This is called the “camelCase” convention. When you’re creating something like a variable or a method (more on methods later), these are the rules that you’ll have to follow.

• The name of your variable cannot start with a number such as “123MyVariable”
• The name of the variable should always start with a lower case letter such as “myVariable”
• When you’re trying to write a composed name, you can either do this : “thisIsTheNameOfTheVariable” or use the underscore to separate either word of the variable’s name like this :  “this_Is_The_Name_Of_The_Variable”
• Never forget to give a meaningful name to your variable

Finally, even following those set of rules is not quite enough. A good programmer should always indent his code a have a moderate use of white spaces. Well, I’ve just blurred some words that won’t really mean something to you so I’ll explain what I’m trying to tell you. Indenting code is a convention where you place tabs in the blocks of code. As for white spaces, there just meant to make code easier to read. It could all be close together, but that wouldn’t do any good if one must spend some time, trying to decrypt what you’ve wrote.

You’ll find below an example :

/*
The following block of code won't work
It will serve as an example to make sure
that you understand indentation
*/
//indentation
int variable_1=10;
{
   int variable_2=13; //See? There was a tab after the curly brace
}

//white spaces(none)
int variable_3=15;
double variable_4=20.0;
decimal variable_5=0.05m;
short variable_6=56;

//white spaces
/*
Putting white before and after operators(more on them later)
is helpful. Your code does not have to be too cramped
More than just that, separate your variables makes it also easier to read

What I suggest is if you have a set of variables that have a relation
altogether, let them be in a group but after create an empty line and then
resume your coding activity
*/
int variable_7 = 123;

double variable_8 = 234.98;

decimal variable_9 = 0.45m;

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