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.
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From the Publisher
Must-Read for Every Programmer and Developer
This classic, endorsed by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin (author of Clean Code), is on many must-read lists for programmers and developers including lists featured on Guru99, DZone, Built In, Dev Community (dev.to), and more.
"The book is important, as almost every developer at some point in career, has to work with a legacy system and it still represents the most challenging problems for many companies. The book goes deep into understanding the general process of a software change like adding features, fixing bugs, optimizing performances, etc."
—Milan Milanovic, DZone, November 2021
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Reviews with images
Copy missing portions of text
The book is good so far, but don't get it here. Apparently this is an "Abridged" version, but I wouldn't even call it that. I've compared this physical copy with a PDF version and parts of sentences and sections are missing in a way that doesn't even make sense. Sentences at the bottom of a page are cut off without an ending, and an entirely new section starts on the next page. On one two page spread (shown in photos), a chart is duplicated, pushing the content down, and the rest of the content that is supposed to be on that page is just omitted entirely. The attached photos are of three pages from my physical copy with the issues I described, and the same three pages from a free PDF version of the book.
Top reviews from other countries
liouba2505
Le cadeau original pour un geek anglophone
Reviewed in France on January 9, 2022
Reviewer
This book is a reprinting of very low quality - beware!
Reviewed in Australia on January 12, 2024