Working Effectively with Legacy Code 1st Edition

This book will change your life as a coder for the better.

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adamzg

May 21, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Whether taking on TDD, breaking dependencies or trying to maintain code that's lacking testing this book is a must read.

Is your code a tangled mess? Are you tired of seeing telescoping methods and methods that are 100s of lines long? Want to clean up code you didn't write and get it under test but everyone's too afraid of breaking things? Does it take you forever to write unit tests? Is it painstaking and laborious? Do you write mainly integration tests because unit testing is too hard? Do you wonder how people can write lots of unit tests, let alone unit test every method? Do you want to kick your object oriented coding skills up a notch? Then this book is for you. It can teach you how to overcome all of those obstacles and so much more.

For me the first roughly 100 pages of the book were a revelation. If you don't understand how to do TDD the problem probably isn't testing, it's probably the code you're trying to test or your perceptions about what it is that you are actually supposed to be testing. Michael Feathers does a great job identifying the mistakes and traps that so many developers experience when trying write and test good code and provides recipes for overcoming them. He adds clarity to what a unit test is and what it's supposed to do and in the process takes a deep dive into what good object oriented code looks like through the eyes of TDD. The book can completely change your perception about what is and is not possible.

In addition to turning your perceptions about testing on their head, Feathers also provides good advice on how to create loosely coupled code, how to identify and eliminate dependencies in existing code as well as strategies for reorganizing poorly structured code into better objects. This book has clearly changed the way I code and the way I think about testing for the better. It's not just about testing it's also about turning procedural code into object oriented code and bringing your object oriented thinking to the next level.

I can't say enough great things about this book. It's dearer to me than any other book in my programming collection including books about object oriented code from Bloch, Beck, Fowler and others. It wasn't until I read Working Effectively with Legacy Code that things really came together for me in the object oriented world. I got the concepts individually but failed to recognize how it all comes together. What's so great about encapsulation / getters and setter? Why is it so important to have classes and methods that do just one thing? What's so important about breaking dependencies between classes? How small is a small method? How can I ever hope to achieve open/closed? How is TDD even possible? Your mileage may vary, but if you're like me this book will change your life for the better.

8 people found this helpful

We don't build software so much as grow it. Here's how to weed and prune.

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Lance Zant

May 8, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

A real eye-opener. I will be re-reading this one very soon. To start with, defining "legacy code" so concisely as, "code without tests" is brilliant. Of course there are many other characteristics, but they all turn out to be derivative from that focal point. From there, the general direction is obvious - what are the safest and fewest things we can do to bring the code under test, because once we have tests all our refactoring weapons come into play.

Some of Michael's techniques are old friends that I never thought to use in this way. Others were things I didn't realize I knew at all, and others were totally new to me. What they all had in common was that they offer a wealth of approaches to incrementally improve a tough situation, both to accomplish the immediate task and to prepare for further improvements later. This pay-as-you go alternative is both more effective and less risky than either of the extremes of doing nothing or large-scale replacement.

Another strength of the book is that Mr. Feathers provides examples in several languages, mostly Java and C++, but also Ruby and some others. This variety is very helpful for deepening our understanding of both the problems and the solutions.

6 people found this helpful

Great book despite its age

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Malodorous

April 30, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book is 11 years old as I write this review, but it is still relevant.

There are two main points in this book:

1. Legacy code is anything without unit tests.
2. Step one of working with legacy code is to write unit tests.

There is more than that, but my point in sharing this is that the author clearly knows the right approach. It is still a good read even if the book is old. However, this is not expert-level material: if you already have experience in this area, this book might teach you a trick or two but you should already know most of what is in here.

2 people found this helpful

Insightful read, but more of a reference manual

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Christopher Kuhn

July 27, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I found Mr. Feathers to be a good author with a very down to earth writing style that made the early chapters easy to read. You may not want to read this book "cover to cover" as I did though. The last few chapters are very dry and technical. The latter half of the book is really more of a reference to whip out when you encounter a problem that you're not sure how to solve. I highly recommend this to anyone who is working with, or about to work with, a legacy code base.

5 people found this helpful

Great book. Provides step-by-step instructions on how to deal ...

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Opher Lekach

August 29, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Great book. Provides step-by-step instructions on how to deal with code to get it better. Provide specific advice for every situation and rules that help you recognize the various situations and appropriate approach. Most of all, it helps you get over the desperation of having to deal with old unwieldy code and shows you how, even in such situation you can make small improvements that over time would get you to a better place without having to stop what you are doing for a year to get there. Really useful.

3 people found this helpful

Practical. It recognizes that in the real world you ...

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Most recent customer reviews

Joe Schmoe

Practical. It recognizes that in the real world you have to work with what you've got, and typically can't take a year off to overhaul old code.Read more

Published 2 months ago

Anton Jorov Antonov

It’s a classic book!

It’s not necessary to explain that in every serious project has a lot of technical debt, and this book give us the right and tested knowledge form many projects.

Published 4 months ago

Eduardo

may find the book useful.

Great book

Published 4 months ago

D. Progovac

I do not consider the book worth money I paid but each reader's needs are different. In my opinion the book is not really about legacy code but about the programming style.Read more

Published 11 months ago

Lives up to its reputation.

Amazon Customer

Arrived on time and as expected

While it's not a bad book I feel the title is a bit misleading

Richard Tjerngren

While it's not a bad book I feel the title is a bit misleading, it should be called something akin to "How to write automated tests in legacy code bases"

George Kovalev

Changed the way I think about software design. A must read.

Joel B.

Very easy read, very good wisdom. Nice, small logic bites.

A manual to surviving spaghetti code, and maybe not creating it in the first place

Ulas Tuerkmen

The books on object-oriented programming written or edited by one of
the signatories of the Agile manifesto (Robert Martin, Martin Fowler
or Kent Beck, to name a few)...Read more