young adult Archives - Page 17 of 102

The Art of Clean Code: Best Practices to Eliminate Complexity and Simplify Your Life
by Christian Mayer (Author)
@ Amazon | Bookshop | IndieBound

Booktalk: Learn eight principles to simplify your code and become a more effective (and successful) programmer with real-world examples:

Concentrate on the important stuff with the 80/20 principle — focus on the 20% of your code that matters most
Avoid coding in isolation: create a minimum viable product to get early feedback
Write code cleanly and simply to eliminate clutter
Avoid premature optimization that risks over-complicating code
Balance your goals, capacity, and feedback to achieve the productive state of Flow
Apply the Do One Thing Well philosophy to vastly improve functionality
Design efficient user interfaces with the Less is More principle
Tie your new skills together into one unifying principle: Focus

Snippet: Large companies like International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Microsoft, and Apple employ the Pareto principle to build faster, more user-friendly computers by channeling their focus on the vital few; that is, by repeatedly optimizing the 20 percent of the code that was executed most often by the average user. Not all code is created equal. A minority of code has a dominating impact on the user experience, while much of the code has little impact. You might double-click the File Explorer icon multiple times per day, but you seldom change the access rights of a file. The 80/20 principle tells you where to focus your optimization efforts!

It’s STEM Friday! (STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)

Future History 2050
by Thomas Harding (Author)
@ Amazon | Bookshop | IndieBound

Booktalk: In 2020, a researcher is shocked to find a set of notebooks detailing the history of the next thirty years. Is this a hoax? Or could it be real?

The notebooks, written in the year 2050, contain interview transcripts between teenage Billy and Gran Nancy. We learn about the great climate SHOCK, when global temperatures rise much faster than anticipated, resulting in catastrophic consequences for humanity. We learn about a shift away from democracy, toward unelected “ethnarchs” — heads of corporations who use their access to our personal data to competently run the world. We learn about the giant city towers where most people live, work and play inside — where it’s safe from natural disasters and viral outbreaks.

And between these interviews, we learn more about Billy, whose interest in the history that has been erased from the official record is causing trouble in 2050. Is it too late to change the past to save the future?

Snippet: My parents and gran talk about flying on airplanes, but I’ve never been on one. No one my age has. They were outlawed back in 2029 at the height of the CLIMATE SHOCK. There’s a lot of talk about inventing a carbon-free means of mass air travel, but the technology hasn’t been invented yet.

BONUS! Download the Teacher’s Guide