The spiral approach
The spiral approach to software learning and development, which preserves a project history as a series of code snapshots or spirals, is used in this book.
The following three points are important in the spiral approach:
- The history of development is preserved.
- Simple solutions are provided first. Later on, these solutions may be replaced by more advanced solutions.
- Only the concepts used in a spiral are explained.
All three points are important to teach and learn these technologies.
Learning new software concepts and technologies is a challenging task. Learning in spirals, from simple to more advanced concepts but with concrete software applications, helps readers get a reasonable confidence level early on, and motivates them to learn by providing more useful applications. With each new spiral, the project grows and new concepts are introduced. A new spiral is explained with respect to the previous one. The difference between the two consecutive spirals is that the next spiral introduces the new code and modifies or deletes the old. This is called learning by anchoring to what we already understand. With a new spiral, we can go back to what we did previously and improve it. In this way, learning in spirals can touch the same topic several times, but each time, with more details in a better version.