notes from my talk about how to best approach the enumerable labs and complex projects in general

gistfile1.txt

two things i want to accomplish in the next hour:
+ clarify the instructions for the enumerable labs
+ teach you guys about how to break problems down (in words)
+ in code (methods are your friend)

first things first:
+ how does everyone feel right now?
+ walls happen, perservere
+ when you don't understand the instructions, make your own and keep going because the solution is likely not going to be as different as if you had 

+ so how do we break things down:
- create a variable in the right place
- give it the right value
- pass it to a function at the right time
- make sure the functoin returns the right thing from that input

ways to make things easier:
-start by hardcoding, then make it abstract
-if you like some data structures and not others, change the structure (start with arrays and move to a hash)
- if nested data structures make you crazy, unnest them and do it with un nested data, then go back and nest that data

save your brain
use variables with useful names as often as you can
when using each, have your variable names SEMANTICALLY  lable what you are iterating through
MAKE METHODS - that way you can test things individually, encapsulation is your friend
"No component in a complex system should depend on the internal details of any other component." 
Dan Ingalls (Smalltalk Architect)