are there tutorials on how to name variables?

Question

as you can probably tell from my previous posts i have horrific naming conventions. do you know of any tutorials dealing with how to name stuff?

Answer 1

i will recommend to check this book http://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Construction/dp/0735619670/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281129036&sr=1-1

Answer 2

I don't think there will be any good tutorials, because there aren't any hard-and-fast rules. Here are some tips:

• Conform to convention: Loop variables are i, j, and k; variable numbers of arguments go in *args and **kwargs; use camelCase or underscored_names.

• Be consistent.

• Be concise. list_of_drugs_used_in_this_program is much less clear than drugs. Similarly, you don't need to include the datatype of the variable in the name: drugs_list is redundant.

• Don't go overboard with the underscores. I've never needed more than one. 2+ is pushing it.

• Never ever ever use metasyntactic variables (foo, spam...) in anything but quick-and-dirty examples. method1 is also out.

But you could summarise all of that with:

Don't be silly.

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Tee hee.

Variable naming conventions can often turn into a religious war, but I’m entirely confident when I declare The World’s Worst Variable Name to be:

$data

Of course it’s data! That’s what variables contain! That’s all they ever can contain. It’s like you’re packing up your belongings to move to a new house, and on the side of the box you write, in big black marker, “matter.”

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2004/03/the_worlds_two_worst_variable.html