I am practicing programming logic a little. And I read head first Java so I decided for start to create simple console Tic Tac Toe game, and I have created a class to represent a game. It works fine but I wonder is this solution good, can this be done better.
Three same character in line gives a point to player. Board size is configurable. I made method to check point in all directions.
The code is fine and as you observed it works. Most of these comments are how you would improve it to be more "industrial strengh".
1) The following two are equivalent
I prefer the second because it is a bit easier to read/recognize the pattern.
2) It is traditional to only use one character variable names for loop variables. What are "f", "s" and "t" ? In the real world, someone left to maintain the program would be left scratching his/her head.
3) I see some duplication in checkXXX. Consider passing f, s and t to a common method which does the logic for three in a row.
4) Why do you catch Exception? Are you expecting something to go wrong?
Also, you said the board size is configurable. If the board size is 5x5, do they need three in a row or five in a row?
Throwing and catching an exception is a very expensive operation (i.e., it takes a long time -- hundreds or even thousands of CPU cycles.) It's considered very bad style to allow exceptions to happen as a matter of course like this. It would be much better to add code that checked whether the indexes were in bounds before looking in the arrays. This is such bad style, in fact, and so unusual that I think that's why Jeanne didn't see at first what you were doing!
Ernest Friedman-Hill wrote: that I think that's why Jeanne didn't see at first what you were doing!
Fair enough. In hindsight it is is obvious. Not a good idea, but obvious.
Joined: Jul 09, 2010
Ok friends, thanks for some direction I fixed code a little bit, is it better
My point of this post is to learn to write valid quality code. I didn't know that exceptions are so heavy operation, thanks for that tip