Clean Code

A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Robert C. Martin | 4.45 | 18,023 ratings and reviews

Recommended by Ana Bell, and 1 others. See all reviews

Ranked #1 in Software Engineering, Ranked #1 in Programming — see more rankings.

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 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.
Clean Code is 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 This book is a must for any developer, software engineer, project manager, team lead, or systems analyst with an interest in producing better code.
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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Clean Code from the world's leading experts.

Ana Bell This book is going to show you how to write code that is readable by yourself in the future, or by somebody else. You can sit on the couch and read it; you don’t need to code. You can actually enjoy it if you don’t know how to program at all. (Source)

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