Don't-Make-Me-Talk-Abouts

No matter which job is yours, you will find them: Things, that are so absolutely essential, that they shouldn’t be worth asking about it: The Don’t-Make-Me-Talk-About’s. A carpenter won’t ask about which direction of wood grain gives best stability. A musician shouldn’t ask about a c-major. A programmer shouldn’t talk about… what? Here are some essentials, worth working with.

Version Control

Whether you work in a team or as a single person. Version Control is for bulletproofed code. It’s so easy to drag and drop this folder in that one, clean up the only line that was not messy or simply shooting down the project by deleting the wrong source-file. If you’re new to version control, you may get an overview over version control’s basic workflows. If your IDE won’t come up with it’s own version management you may want use the following open source version control systems:

Subversion -Make sure to check out Subversion’s Online Book. Some of the most famous open source projects are using it (e.g. PHP, Apache, FreeBSD). The repository runs on it’s own server.

Git – Perfect for small projects and a quick solution. It doesn’t take much time to set up a git repository and even the configuration is rather easy. Have a look on the official git-tutorial

Darcs – It is as easy to use as Git. Check out the “Getting Started” on darcs.net

Documentation

The syntax is often the same – so is their mightyness. Documentation-tools help you generating and maintaining a complete (searchable!) documentation for your projects, offering usefule overviews like class-diagrams, caller-graphs and many more. At the beginning it might be a bit annoying to comment every mouthful of code, but the result is worth the efford; especially when maintaining projects or reusing code.

doxygen – The mother of all documentation-tools. Supports various programming languages, such as C, C++, Java, Objective-C, Python, PHP or C#.

phpDocumentor – Specialized doc-tool for PHP. Have a look on the Quickstart.

As a Java-Developer you may be already familiar with javadoc which is a part of JDK since version 2.

IDEs

Everyone has his own preferences in this point and the number of IDEs is as high as there are preferences out there. However, make sure to check out these two before going back to your texteditor again.

Eclipse – Once aimed to Java, there are hundreds of plugins for different other things out there. Whether it is HTML, CSS, PHP, Python etc., you will find a plugin. Even Subversion (SubClipse) and Git (EGit) supported.

NetBeans – A complete package of nerdgasm features to battle with eclipse without loosing.

MonoDevelop – Not only useful for C/C++/C#-developement and .NET under linu, but also for Python. It has a great GTK-Wizzard.

By the way: VIM & VI are texteditors and no IDEs.

Anything else?

Of course there are much more things not worth talking about. Which things do you consider as absolute essentials?