Clean Code - Book Review

October 17, 2008 at 1:00 am · Filed under Books - written by Elliot Gibson

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Clean Code - Written by Robert C. Martin

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. Software expert Robert C. Martin presents Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. Martin 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 a 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.

When you do code maintenance, you can really “love” or “hate” a person that you do not even know just by the code he or she has written. Messy code almost always goes hand in hand with lower productivity, lower motivation, and a higher number of bugs. In the first chapter, Robert C. Martin presents in a very instructive way, the opinion from very well-known personalities about what “clean code” is, and also suggests we apply the Boy Scout Rule (Leave the campground cleaner that you found it) to our code. The following chapters present practical advice about how to do this cleaning (or even better, how to avoid the mess in the first place).

The suggestions made in the book may sound very familiar to any experienced programmer but they are presented with such a level of detail and with very good examples that it is almost impossible not to learn valuable things chapter by chapter. All the examples are in Java, but the concepts that they explain can be applied, in most of the cases, to other languages.

This book is mainly for programmers wanting to expand their current coding knowledge. That said, I would also recommend it for a first time programmer as it can help you understand how to have cleaner code to start with! Clean Code can also be purchased as an ebook which probably appeals to more than the paperback version.