The Plan: Idea to Design
Wayne J. Graham · Apress eBooks · 2012
If you are like most developers (myself included), you most likely have opened your favorite editor or IDE and just started developing. You may have had some vague idea of what you wanted your program to do, but you probably just made it up as you went along. Although this can work well for small projects, or learning new techniques, a design-as-you-go approach on a project of a nontrivial size will cause you a lot of headaches. As someone who has started more than one project as an experiment with no plan to grow it into something, I can attest to the fact that you encounter far fewer problems if you spend a little bit of time planning your project out, to understand its scope and anticipate where the hard parts of it will be. This is especially important if you plan to produce an application that is fun and scalable to all the individuals who may install your application on Facebook!