Get Ready for Your Mission to Mars

As a beginner or intermediate programmer, getting a sense for good and clean code that others will recognize as such might appear to you as something far, far away, a goal almost unreachable—a long journey, full of unexpected problems and unknown experiences. It’s a bit like traveling through space to a destination that humanity hasn’t reached yet: a journey to Mars! That was sort of how we felt when we started to learn programming many years ago.

We’ve written the code in this book with the theme of a Mars mission, so all the code examples have something spacey about them. But the real reason is that we don’t want to distract you from the problem in a code snippet with the setting that the code is in. We used the astronaut theme to give you a better read, avoid meaningless variable names like x and y, or the umpteenth inheritance hierarchy from animals to mammals to cats. (We have nothing against cats—we just think they’re overused in teaching material.)

Our comparisons are based on code and coding problems that we’ve found that a beginner or intermediate programmer often runs into when she’s learning to program. We’ve extracted the underlying problems and put them into the domain of space travel so it’s easier to imagine the context around them.

We can’t guarantee that you’ll become an astronaut after reading this book, but we’re very confident that you’ll be a better programmer. So fasten your seatbelt, and onward into (programmer) space!