1. Documentation and Style

2. Documentation and Comments  Programs should be self-documenting.  Use meaningful variable names.  Use indentation and white space to show program structure (jGRASP does most of this automatically)  Use comments to explain what the program is doing.

3. Comments in Java  Anything following a double slash ( // ) on a line is considered a comment, e.g., double radius; //in inches  Anything between the symbols /* and */, no matter how many lines are included, is considered to be a comment, e.g., /*This is a comment */

4. Program Comment Header  It’s good to put a comment header block at the beginning of each separately compilable piece of code. For example, for this class you might have a header like the following: /* Purpose: to determine the area of a circle Author: Jane Q. Programmer E-mail Address: jqprogrammer@csun.edujqprogrammer@csun.edu Programming Assignment: #3 Last Changed: September 1, 2009 */

5. Placement of Brackets and Indentation  One convention for the placement of brackets is the one used in our textbook (example).example  A second convention is to line up the open and close brackets in the same column (example).example  The code inside each set of brackets is indented.

6. Naming Constants  Place the keywords public static final in front of the declaration setting the value of the constant, e.g., public static final double PI = 3.14159;  By convention constants are named using all capital letters.