This week i read Robert C. Martin's Clean Code book. With so many great books already available about writing good code, the first question i asked myself was: do we really need another one? The answer turns out to be YES!
At around 350 pages (depending on which of the appendices you find useful), this book really covers a lot of ground, but in a concise (without being too concise) way. You'll find the typical sound advice on using good names, writing good functions, good vs bad comments, formatting, abstractions, encapsulation, robustness, integrating third-party code, testing, refactoring, class design, system design, enabling emergent design and dealing with concurrency. After all of that, there are a couple of chapters where existing code is improved step by step. To top it all off, the final chapter contains an extensive list of smells and heuristics.
Some of you are probably thinking that all of this looks rather familiar, especially if you've read books like Code Complete, Refactoring and Implementation Patterns. And this book really doesn't offer anything new that nobody ever wrote about before. It is however the best, and most accessible collection of good advice on good code and design that i've read so far.
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