programming-for-dummies

Creating a Help File 103
Obviously, if you want to speed up your program, you’d focus on the part that
runs most often, and that’s what a profiler does. A profiler examines your program
and identifies the most frequently used parts of that program. After you
know which parts of your program run most often, you can work on making
that part of the program run faster, a process known as optimizing.
Profilers typically use two methods for examining a program:
✦ Sampling: This examines your entire program at fixed time intervals.
Through sampling, a profiler can get a rough estimate on which parts of
your program (often referred to as hot spots) are being run most often.
✦ Instrumentation mode: After you use sampling to identify hot spots,
you can use this mode to examine the program in more detail to determine
exactly what each program line does.
By identifying the hot spots, you can speed up your entire program by
rewriting or optimizing those frequently run parts of the program.
By optimizing a small part of your program, such as ten percent of that
program, you can often improve the entire program’s performance
dramatically.
Book I
Chapter 4
Programming Tools
Creating a Help File
Hardly anyone reads software manuals, so when people need help, they typically
turn to the program’s help file for answers. This help file is essentially
the software manual organized as miniature Web pages that you can view
and click to see similar (linked) information, as shown in Figure 4-9.
Almost every program has a help file, but creating a help file can be tedious
and time-consuming. So to simplify this process, many programmers use
special help file creation programs.
Just as a word processor makes it easy to write, edit, and format text, help
file creators make it easy to write, edit, organize, and link text together to
create a help file.