Learning to program is difficult for many reasons, but learning to program games is even more difficult, specifically because there are so many different systems and object types that need to interact with each other. Throughout this book, we have covered some of the most important design patterns to make those interactions as simple as possible. Each chapter focused explicitly on a design pattern to help make coding easier. However, buried within each paragraph and code sample are core ideas and techniques to help make our design easier to read and maintain.

These Best Practices can sometimes be found in other books; however, programming books often strive to teach you the grammar of a language, as opposed to style, design, and organization. Even books about design patterns may gloss over these fundamental techniques. Since they are so fundamental, it is easy to forget they are not necessarily explicitly discussed everywhere. That leaves you, the reader, forced to read dozens of books and scour the Internet for blog posts that talk about these fundamentals. Worse, you are required to spend hours and hours writing code with the feeling that it could be better, but you just don't understand why it isn't.

Of course, all those things will happen anyway. Part of being a programmer is constantly reading books like this. You should be looking for ways to improve by reading blogs and you will write code that you consider garbage after six months. This is all part of becoming better. It is our hope in writing this book that you can understand and incorporate these fundamentals into your programs sooner rather than later.