In no particular order....
- Isn't code review offered in principle by both Seekers of Perl Wisdom and, for shorter questions, Q & A?
- At the level of the slycer and BastardOperator and, I hope, myself you run into a thorny problem -- most, although by no means all, of my mistakes will be structural rather than procedural (unless I'm venturing into uncharted territory -- in which case I'm probably back at the level of quick and dirty answers).
- This makes it extremely difficult for someone to review a section of my code and say: "this could be done better," because doing so would involve a review of all the code... which is generally going to be well over 300 lines
- Speaking for myself, I also come from a non-traditional programming background (uh, Comparative Literature) and have reached the point where I need to understand more about the why before I can move forward again with the how. I've been trying to work my way through Mastering Algorithms (and getting bogged down in b-trees) but it makes me think that a section devoted to strategy rather than review might be more helpful.
- After all, most of the time I waste is going back when I discover that a particularl methodology doesn't get me where I need to be, not that a particular subroutine in causing me problems.
I hope this makes sense, because I'm arguing not for a section where code is excluded but where the discussion 'decomposes' into code from a meta-programmatic level -- e.g. I'm writing an application to watch a log-file and report on irregular behavior -- I know that I need to mask the process itself so that a hacker won't realize they're being observed, and I also need a way to recover any data they might have changed. Where should I look for more information about this? And what are the common traps that people writing this kind of program fall into?
The thing that I like about this idea is that it enables me to ask complex questions and get useful answers without either a) expecting anyone to give up a large amount of their time reviewing the implementation, or b) being handed the answer on a plate which doesn't help me learn.
Hope this makes sense.