1.2 Software Engineering
Unlike most books on data science, this book lays more emphasis on properly structuring code. The reason for this is that we noticed that many data scientists simply place their code into one large file and run all the statements sequentially. You can think of this like forcing book readers to always read it from beginning to end, without being allowed to revisit earlier sections or jump to interesting sections right away. This works fine for small and simple projects, but, as the project becomes bigger or more complex, more problems will start to arise. For example, in a well-written book, the book is split into distinctly-named chapters and sections which contain several references to other parts in the book. The software equivalent of this is splitting code into functions. Each function has a name and some contents. By using functions, you can tell the computer at any point in your code to jump to some other place and continue from there. This allows you to more easily re-use code between projects, update code, share code, collaborate, and see the big picture. Hence, with functions, you can save time.
So, while reading this book, you will eventually get used to reading and using functions. Another benefit of having good software engineering skills is that it will allow you to more easily read the source code of the packages that you’re using, which could be greatly beneficial when you are debugging your code or wondering how exactly the package that you’re using works. Finally, you can rest assured that we did not invent this emphasis on functions ourselves. In industry, it is common practice to encourage developers to use “functions instead of comments”. This means that, instead of writing a comment for humans and some code for the computer, the developers write a function which is read by both humans and computers.
Also, we’ve put much effort into sticking to a consistent style guide. Programming style guides provide guidelines for writing code; for example, about where there should be whitespace and what names should be capitalized or not. Sticking to a strict style guide might sound pedantic and it sometimes is. However, the more consistent the code is, the easier it is to read and understand the code. To read our code, you don’t need to know our style guide. You’ll figure it out when reading. If you do want to see the details of our style guide, check out Section 8.2.
