Ok, now that the basics have been covered I will quickly go over a few advanced coding practices. All of these subjects should be covered in their own articles, so please look into them more thoroughly when you have the extra time.
CVS
Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) or its alternative, Subversion, are open source version control and collaboration systems. They are used as a means of sharing, saving and recovering version information for people writing and editing code. Even when you are the only programmer it is a good idea to use it. We have all made changes to our code (sometimes extensive changes) only to find it doesn't work, or breaks something else, or is just a plain old bad idea. Versioning systems let you roll your code back to before these changes occurred.
Bug Tracking
Bug tracking is the process used to record and track coding errors as they are found. The process includes recording the bug report, reviewing it and recording the fix needed and any patches needed and/or applied. One of the best known bug tracking systems is Bugzilla.
Unit Testing
Unit testing is a method of testing a particular module of source code. Data covering common and edge case input are passed to the module of source code and the results are verified. Some feel that the unit tests should be written before the code. Unit testing is commonly associated with extreme programming though it existed long before that.
/ 9 