Coding Best Practices

Introduction

The pages here attempt to document the best practices that should be used when updating or creating new Misterhouse Scripts. Misterhouse has evolved over the past decade along with Perl and computing in general. This evolution is evident in much of the software underlying Misterhouse. There are also many ways to accomplish the same task in Perl and the Misterhouse code. The best practices described here describe the most recent advances in Misterhouse development and Perl. Keeping with the general "anything goes" nature of Perl, all of the best practices here are optional. However the guidelines here should help to create more functional code that is easier to maintain by multiple people.

• • Comment:** These pages are a work in progress and I really am not an experienced Misterhouse developer ( I do know Perl quite well). As such, much of what you find here might be 1) wrong and 2) not really a best practice. I started these pages while writing my first Misterhouse common code script as a place to document what I discovered. If you are an experienced Misterhouse developer please help me by updating sections so that they are more accurate and relevant. Especially update sections where I say "probably ... this way" and "appears to ... like this". I will not make definitive statements that I have not confirmed but I can easily misunderstand undocumented features. If you know how something works, maybe because you wrote the code, please update the text.

Sections

Documentation - Script Documentation Best Practices Debugging and Logging - Module debugging and message logging Best Practices