First coding ... and people start at the top and work through to the bottom. Example: [here].

Then they find bits of code repeating, and they separate the repeating stuff out into functions. Example : [here].

In order to re-use the repeated stuff in other programs, they then save it to another file which can be loaded in lots of programs. Example: [here] with the included file [here].

Finally, as the application grows there may be good reasons to group all the named code blocks associated with a particular type of data into a class. Example of a calling program [here], and the class file [here].

It can be quite difficult for newcomers to programming to appreciate steps 2, 3 and 4 ... but if you can learn about them early on, you can save yourself a huge amount of recoding later. Learning by your mistakes is sometimes good, but it's usually inefficient!
(written 2011-09-24)

 Q101 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Programming Principles
  [3673] Object oriented or structured - a comparison in Python. Also writing clean regular expressions - (2012-03-26)
  [3551] Some terms used in programming (Biased towards Python) - (2011-12-12)
  [3548] Dark mornings, dog update, and Python and Lua courses before Christmas - (2011-12-10)
  [3542] What order are operations performed in, in a Perl expression? - (2011-12-07)
  [3026] Coding efficiency - do not repeat yourself! - (2010-11-02)
  [2964] An introduction to file handling in programs - buffering, standard in and out, and file handles - (2010-09-21)
  [2915] Looking up a value by key - associative arrays / Hashes / Dictionaries - (2010-08-11)
  [2878] Program for reliability and efficiency - do not duplicate, but rather share and re-use - (2010-07-19)
  [2769] Easy - but for whom? - (2010-05-18)
  [2737] Improving your function calls (APIs) - General and PHP - (2010-04-24)
  [2586] And and Or illustrated by locks - (2010-01-17)
  [2550] Do not copy and paste code - there are much better ways - (2009-12-26)
  [2510] The music of the stock market - (2009-11-22)
  [2415] Variable names like i and j - why? - (2009-09-22)
  [2327] Planning! - (2009-08-08)
  [2310] Learning to write high quality code in Lua - (2009-07-30)
  [2228] Where do I start when writing a program? - (2009-06-11)
  [2022] Pre and post increment - the ++ operator - (2009-02-03)
  [2001] I have not programmed before, and need to learn - (2009-01-19)

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