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.
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Popular Highlights in this book
Functions should either do something or answer something, but not both.Highlighted by 3,369 Kindle readers- The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code.Highlighted by 3,010 Kindle readers
- FUNCTIONS SHOULD DO ONE THING. THEY SHOULD DO IT WELL. THEY SHOULD DO IT ONLY.Highlighted by 2,641 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
From the Preface of "Clean Architecture"
“…The rules of software architecture are the rules of ordering and assembling the building blocks of programs. And since those building blocks are universal and haven’t changed, the rules for ordering them are likewise universal and changeless.
But one thing has changed: Back then, we didn’t know what the rules were. Consequently, we broke them, over and over again. Now, with half a century of experience behind us, we have a grasp of those rules.
And it is those rules—those timeless, changeless, rules—that this book is all about.”
— Robert C. "Uncle Bob" Martin
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| Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship | The Clean Code: Practical Advices for the Professional Programmer | Clean Craftsmanship: Desciplines, Standards, and Ethics | Clean Agile: Back to Basics | Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design | |
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| Price | $34.27 | $35.99 | $27.05 | $40.03 | $39.83 |
| Best agile practices of cleaning code “on the fly” Software Craftsmanship. | Endure and succeed amidst swirling uncertainty and nonstop pressure. | Picks up where Clean Code leaves off, outlining additional ways to write quality and trusted code you can be proud of every day. | A clear and concise guide to basic Agile values and principles. Perfect for those new to Agile methods and long-time developers who want to simplify approaches for the better. | Direct, no-nonsense answers to key architecture and design questions. | |
| "It is the best pragmatic application of Lean principles to software I have ever seen in print." —James O. Coplien, Founder of the Pasteur Organizational Patterns project | “Some technical books inspire and teach; some delight and amuse. Rarely does a technical book do all four of these things.” — George Bullock | ". . . [A] timely and humble reminder of the ever-increasing complexity of our programmatic world and how we owe it to the legacy of humankind--and to ourselves--to practice ethical development.” — Stacia Heimgartner Viscardi, CST & Agile Mentor | “What is in the world of Agile development is nothing compared to what could be. This book is Bob’s perspective on what to focus on to get to that ‘what could be.’ And he’s been there, so it’s worth listening.” — Kent Beck | "A good architecture comes from understanding it more as a journey than as a destination, more as an ongoing process of enquiry than as a frozen artifact." — Kevlin Henney |
Pick Up Where Clean Code Leaves Off
"As software developers, we have to continually solve important problems for our employers, customers, colleagues, and future selves. Getting the app to work, though difficult, is not enough, it does not make you a craftsman. With an app working, you have passed the app-titude test. You may have the aptitude to be a craftsman, but there is more to master. In these pages, Bob expresses clearly the techniques and responsibilities to go beyond the app-titude test and shows the way of the serious software craftsman."
— James Grenning, author of Test-Driven Development for Embedded C and Agile Manifesto co-author
Good, but tightly coupled to Java and starting to age poorly
3.5 stars. I'm rounding up.Much of the information in this books is eye opening, particularly the chapters on functions, classes, and code smells. However, a serious problem is that this book is very, very Java-centric, and it is clearly a product of its 2009 copyright date. Many of the chapters have been made moot (PEP8 and Prettier making the formatting chapter largely obsolete, for example), and a few aren't totally applicable to any other language.Note about buying a new, physical version from Amazon: don't. The book will be damaged in shipping as it just comes in a padded envelope and will be dog-eared like a used book before you receive it. See my picture.
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