Review: Clean Code

"Clean Code"by Robert C. Martin is not a conventional programming book. It's not about a new language, framework, methodology or tool. It's about how to be a better developer.

As such, it has much in common with books likeCode Complete,Effective Java,The Pragmatic Programmer,Refactoring, andImplementation Patterns, all of which fall into a genre I've dubbed "self-help books for software developers". I'm not being dismissive here: after all, systems can be just as dysfunctional as families. As developers, we can benefit from some good advice on how to cope.

Much of the advice that "Uncle Bob" dispenses will be familiar to readers of those other books. (Indeed, "Clean Code" references "Refactoring", "Implementation Patterns" and "The Pragmatic Programmer" quite extensively.) I find this redundancy comforting rather than disappointing. After all, if all these books disagreed about what the best software development practices were, how would you know which advice to follow?

(However, there is a certain irony in having read about the DRY principle - "Don't Repeat Yourself" - in three different books.)

Despite the commonalities with its predecessors, "Clean Code" is more than just a rehashing of old advice. The unique aspect of "Clean Code" is the section near the end of the book where "Uncle Bob" uses the principles laid out in the preceding 12 chapters to refactor samples real-world code drawn from the JUnit testing framework, the JCommon library, and his own work.

It was fascinating to see perfectly functional code iteratively refactored into "clean code" much better suited for reuse and further extension. Other books have explained this principle and demonstrated it on small pieces of example code, but only in "Clean Code" have I seen it applied to widely-used open-source code.

If you've ever wanted to refactor some dysfunctional code but not known where to start, or doubted that the end result would justify the effort, you should read Martin's book; it will give you the hope and confidence to give it a try.