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Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

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Format: Paperback


Description

Even bad code can function. But if code isn’t clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Noted software expert Robert C. Martin, presents a revolutionary paradigm with Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. Martin, who has helped bring agile principles from a practitioner’s point of view to tens of thousands of programmers, has teamed up with his colleagues from Object Mentor to distill their best agile practice of cleaning code “on the fly” into a book that will instill within you the values of software craftsman, and make you a better programmer―but only if you work at it. What kind of work will you be doing? You’ll be reading code―lots of code. And you will be challenged to think about what’s right about that code, and what’s wrong with it. More importantly you will be challenged to reassess your professional values and your commitment to your craft. Clean Codeis divided into three parts. The first describes the principles, patterns, and practices of writing clean code. The second part consists of several case studies of increasing complexity. Each case study is an exercise in cleaning up code―of transforming a code base that has some problems into one that is sound and efficient. The third part is the payoff: a single chapter containing a list of heuristics and “smells” gathered while creating the case studies. The result is a knowledge base that describes the way we think when we write, read, and clean code. Readers will come away from this book understanding How to tell the difference between good and bad code How to write good code and how to transform bad code into good code How to create good names, good functions, good objects, and good classes How to format code for maximum readability How to implement complete error handling without obscuring code logic How to unit test and practice test-driven development What “smells” and heuristics can help you identify bad codeThis book is a must for any developer, software engineer, project manager, team lead, or systems analyst with an interest in producing better code. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pearson; 1st edition (August 1, 2008)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 4


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 84


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.77 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.8 x 0.9 x 9 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #17,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #3 in Software Design & Engineering #5 in Software Testing #12 in Software Development (Books)


#3 in Software Design & Engineering:


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Top Amazon Reviews


  • Excellent for the whole team
As CTO of a software company I co-founded, I'm not only looking for books that help me improve individually, but also books that the whole development team – from developers to architects – may find useful. Robert C. Martin’s Clean Code does both, and, like the good code described therein, it’s well written, clear, and easy to read. Martin includes many helpful examples and his suggestions are applicable to any programming language. Ideally, each developer takes charge of their own education and is constantly improving their skillset, an aspect that Martin covers in The Clean Coder. I view it as an important part of my job to help my team improve. To do so, I distill a lot of written material down to actionable components and provide that to my development team. Concepts from Clean Code have become very helpful guides for them. Below are a few of my favorite takeaways. The first is what Martin calls The Boy Scout Rule: “Leave the campground a little cleaner than you found it.” It’s a great concept, not only because it's simple to follow, but also because it has broad applicability and can be used on any project. Essentially, when a team member works on a piece of code, they should aim to improve it somehow by the time their task is finished. A few examples of this among many are: fixing an unclear variable name, breaking up a large function into smaller functions, or cleaning up a conditional for improved clarity. With everyone on the team doing this, the code improves over time and everyone feels responsible for the code whether they wrote it personally or not. Even if something can’t be addressed immediately, developers are encouraged to log the issues they see. Another of my favorite takeaways is the Three Laws of TDD, a concept I was able to quickly roll out to the team as a framework to follow for how TDD should be conducted on a project. This virtually ensures that all of your product code has test coverage. It also helps make most of your code SOLID (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_%28object-oriented_design%29), since code that is built in this fashion is structured with SOLID concepts in mind. This is a must for effective testing. Finally, the topics of proper identifier names and commenting really resonated with me and my team. In our company, we tend to “adopt” existing codebases – projects that have already been started by other developers whose code is of widely varying quality. If we're lucky, it's structured well and demonstrates best practices and approaches in how it's constructed. Unfortunately, the code is sloppy at times and requires some TLC to get it in shape. A part of that process is understanding what the existing application does. As Clean Code correctly outlines, many comments are superfluous or even plain wrong and misleading. As a team, we don’t blindly trust the accuracy of existing comments and instead go right to the application’s code to determine what it does. This is where proper naming comes into play. With good names, the code reads like comments or as a narrative of what the application does, nullifying most needs for additional commenting. Simply put, the code comments itself. We also use refactoring tools to improve names and clean up comments as we go. Of course, by doing so, we’re also applying the Boy Scout Rule. Overall, Clean Code is a wonderful book with much useful and immediately-applicable information for developers of all levels. If you're looking for a book that will help make you a better developer, this will. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2015 by Peter J. Hanson

  • Learning to leave the code cleaner than before
As part of our learning activities, we learn quite a few programming languages. We also learn designs, patterns, good coding practices, and many more. We don't usually spend time to learn how to write a good, readable code. The relevance of this book is enormous. Not just the programmers should read it, the education providers should also read it. In fact, the education providers should plan to include this in their curriculum associated with every programming languages. I started reading this book and finished it in almost three consecutive sittings. That way, the book is well structured, and the topics are well sequenced. The author cautioned at the beginning of the book that it is not for the armchair readers. The reader should spend adequate effort to read through the code examples, think through those, and try out some of those through self scribbling. This is indeed necessary for the coders. This is also necessary for the instructors of coding, or programming languages. I chose to skim through the examples with just enough thinking while paying attention to every detail of the English text. Such speed reading worked for me too. Such reading technique should work for all who are not into direct coding today, but was a programmer once upon a time, and spends a lot of time in conversing with the programmers nowadays. Coming back to the content of the book - this was quite informative and thought provoking. I read it fully and tried to jot down my takeaways from this book reading. I have got six of them. I learned the general rules for commenting, and summarized those in four points. I learned the general rules for code formatting, and summarized those in four points. I learned the general practice of code size - for a significant system, for a code file, for a typical function. I learned the general rules of organizing concepts and variables, and summarized those in five points. In fact, the definition of concepts was itself was a new learning for me. I learned the three laws of test driven development, rather I re-learned those once more while reading this book. Finally, I jotted down the final takeaway - leave the code cleaner than what you had started with. The book is full of good references, in fact at the end of every chapter. I tried to summarize the list of further readings, and I got another five book titles listed in my to-read list. I read it on my Kindle device, and on my desktop using Amazon Cloud Reader - the formatting was good. As coders, we all have the responsibility to leave the code cleaner than what we start with. As code reviewers, we all have the responsibility to comment on the cleanliness of the codes. As the supervisor or manager of coders, we all have the responsibility to communicate the importance of clean coding and to encourage coders towards clean coding. I will recommend to all these group of people to read this book, and practice the clean coding techniques described here. Good work indeed! ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2017 by Arijit Chakraborti

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