Winter Scripting Games: Profiles in Perfection
David Coles
As part of the 2007 Winter Scripting Games the Script Center is profiling competitors who recorded a perfect score in the 2007 Scripting Games. Here, in his own words, is a little something about David Coles, who received perfect scores in both the VBScript Beginners and VBScript Advanced divisions.
Check out more Profiles in Perfection from the 2007 Scripting Games.
David Coles
David Coles is a 21-year-old Australian undergraduate studying Software Engineering/Discrete Maths at the University of Melbourne. He is currently about to enter his fourth year at the University. He is also an officer and committee member for the Melbourne University Computer Students Association. In September he intends to travel to the United Kingdom to spend a year studying in Edinburgh.
David’s first experience with scripting came early on, writing batch scripts for DOS. With the advent of the Web he quickly picked up VBScript as his scripting language of choice and used it for several small web projects. Since then VBScript has stood him in good stead as a quick and easy language to be able to ‘throw something together’ when needed. When he stumbled upon the Winter Scripting Games early in 2007 he knew that it was a great chance to have a little fun with the language.
This year he intends to also enter the Windows PowerShell division to explore and have some fun with the .NET Framework; he also hopes to drag a few of his university friends along for the ride. His university homepage is at http://www.student.unimelb.edu.au/dcoles/.
Scripting Tips:
| • | Have a copy of the language reference on hand. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to look up a function that I couldn’t quite remember the syntax of or was sure that there must be a way of doing that thing already. |
| • | Keep it simple. One of the greatest things about scripting languages is the fact that you can achieve so much so easily. Writing a small script that does a single task well is far more useful than spending many, many hours on writing a fully-fledged program that does everything but the kitchen sink just to solve one small problem. |
| • | Have at least a rough idea of the standard libraries. It’s just silly to reinvent code when there’s a class or library that you could hook into and make it do it for you. But unless you know where to look for it, you can’t use it! |
