The Cattle Drive forum is where the drivers get together to complain, uh rather, discuss their assignments and encourage each other. Thanks to the enthusiastic initiative of Johannes de Jong, you can keep track of your progress on the drive with the Assignment Log. If you're tough enough to get through the nitpicking, you'll see your name on the Graduation Log.

Gettin' them doggies...
The past month has been a whirlwind of ol' timers coming back, and spurs being passed around like crazy! The list of active drivers shows around 18 drivers lately, the majority kickin' up dust in the OOP and Servlets corrals. Those doggies are the tough 'uns, so writin' em up and cleaning out the nits takes a bit longer.

And a shiny spur goes to...
The past month has been wilder than a Texas Twister when it comes to graduates!  Josue Cedeno wrangled his first graduation by passing through the Java Basics course.  Good job Josue!

At the OOP corral, Rick Prevett and Sam Tilley blazed through the assignments and got themselves a second spur.  Y'all done real good!

Back from being out on the range...
We're glad to announce that Joel Cochran and Paul Ralph decided they had enough of the easy life and came back to the dirt and the grime that is the Cattle Drive.  Glad to have y'all back, we're planning on workin' ya hard!

Saddle sore...
Ronald Schindler has got his eye on the silver spur for OOP.  Keep wrastlin' with the code, Ronald, you'll be there in no time!

Peter Gragert is serving up his final assignment in the Servlets section.  We'll save you a seat at the graduation saloon!

And it's finally here, the instructor's solution to JDBC-4 has been completed.  Jason Adam and Lance Finney can see their JDBC spur on the horizon.

Nitpicking is hard work too...
We know they're workin' reeeeeally hard, after all we've seen what those assignments look like once the nitpickers have combed through 'em. Hats off to Marilyn deQueiroz and Jason Adam for their dedication and patience with the pesky vermin that always manage to make their way into those assignments.

Tips for the Trail…
While comments are good to have, and can help clarify parts of your code, too many comments can make a program unreadable.  Instead, focus on writing code that uses identifiers and expressions that explain themselves, and leave comments to the trickier parts of your program.  Like we've mentioned time and again, readability is one of the most important goals of the Cattle Drive, and for writing code in general!

Written by Jason Adam and Pauline McNamara