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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
Book title needs refactoring
This is a great book, and one which any developer will learn a great deal from. In most respects, it is a five-star book, but... the title is misleading. By rights it should be called "Clean Java Code".
Let me explain: I am an ActionScript developer, and bought this book to improve my code style and structure. For the most part, it has done that: the chapters...
Published 13 months ago by Dan Sumption
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Above Average Coding book, with some poor examples
A decent enough manual, with some good basic beginners stuff. Couple of worrying examples ( e.g. code simply consuming exceptions and returning empty vectors as if nothing has gone wrong - perhaps there was a context for it but I think it encourages a poor approach to exception handling - if you cant deal with it don't consume it!).
For more advanced stuff I...
Published 6 months ago by Daniel Byer
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
Book title needs refactoring, 27 Oct 2008
This is a great book, and one which any developer will learn a great deal from. In most respects, it is a five-star book, but... the title is misleading. By rights it should be called "Clean Java Code".
Let me explain: I am an ActionScript developer, and bought this book to improve my code style and structure. For the most part, it has done that: the chapters on naming, comments, functions and classes are absolutely superb. But then, huge swathes of the book are devoted exclusively to Java, and use some fairly complex (and, in my opinion, not very well formatted) code to convey their intention.
I don't generally have a problem with using Java-oriented books to learn more general programming concepts (Martin Fowler's "Refactoring" and O'Reilly's Head-First Design Patterns are both books I would recommend to anyone, regardless of their language-of-choice), but around 1/3rd of Bob Martin's book is virtually impenetrable to anyone who does not already have significant Java experience.
That said, I should re-iterate that this book will be hugely valuable to any programmer. I just wish that they had tried to use a little more pseudo-code and a little less real-world examples, with all of the complexities entailed, and I think a lot could have been done to make the Java code more readable for users of other languages.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
A valuable text, but needs a clean-up, 30 Nov 2008
Clean Code is a valuable book for any programmer's bookshelf. Although a lot of the information can be found in other books on software development, particularly those covering "agile" techniques, the text brings everything into one place with a very readable and enjoyable style. I could've done with this about fifteen years ago, rather than learning many of the lessons the hard way over the years.
The book does have some minor issues though. As mentioned by a previous reviewer, it uses Java exclusively for the examples and assumes you are an experienced Java developer. Some of the examples can be heavy going for those unfamiliar with the language.
The book could also do with a bit more proof-reading. Ignoring a copyright of 2009, the words "it's" and "its" seem to have been swapped throughout the book, "an" replaces "and" in a handful of sentences, and there are even some words in the text that are completely wrong. A bit of shame considering.
Don't let the Java or proof-reading put you off though.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A five star book in a four star cover, 21 Jan 2009
This book has a great summary chapter - Chapter 17. I read this first and decided to read the rest of the book even though there wasn't much I hadn't come across before.
The book really is very readable and covers a lot of ground, generally at intermediate developer level. Advanced developers won't come across anything new, however there is a lot of good advice in one place. This is generally clearly explained with some examples that hint at the level of simplicity that can be achieved in production code with a bit of extra time and a lot of extra effort.
The Law of Demeter is explained with the usual lack of clarity, but there is enough supporting material that I finally understood what it is really about - everything within a scope should be at the same level of abstraction. It was a bit of a revelation when the implications started to sink in.
The Formatting chapter has some interesting insights into the rationale of some of the formatting techniques that I developed naturally over more than 20 years of writing code.
The sub-title reads "A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship". There is the odd nod in the Agile direction, but the text is much more about software craftsmanship than it is about agile, and none the worse for it.
I've already lent the book to one of my colleagues, and I hope to get it back before too long.
Unusually for a Prentice Hall publication the editing is not as good as it should be, and the cover is cheap - it had a distinctive curl after the first reading stint. This is a shame as it's a book that needs to be passed around.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Above Average Coding book, with some poor examples, 28 April 2009
A decent enough manual, with some good basic beginners stuff. Couple of worrying examples ( e.g. code simply consuming exceptions and returning empty vectors as if nothing has gone wrong - perhaps there was a context for it but I think it encourages a poor approach to exception handling - if you cant deal with it don't consume it!).
For more advanced stuff I would advise "Joel on software" , which whilst older feels like it has a lot more genuine developer experience wedged inside it.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A must-read, 10 May 2009
A great book about coding style, that I recommend to every software developer.
Some of the guidelines are just common sense, but the resulting picture is amazing. The book is well-organized and the writing style is pleasing. The most important aspects about writing good quality code are pointed out throughout the entire book, and will stick into your mind. Once you are done reading it, you will probably forget the smallest details but you will definitely write better code. Later you will be able to refresh your memory just reading the last chapter, that is indeed a summary of best practice.
As someone pointed out on other reviews, the examples in this book are written in Java, but it should not be a problem for a book about clean code. All you have to understand is the Java syntax, and that is something that every programmer should be able to learn easily.
One last note: I don't see why the author wrote the two chapters on concurrent programming, since there are far better titles on that subject, but the five stars stand anyway.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Page turner, 28 Nov 2008
This book is, believe it or not, a page turner! Yes, dear friends, you heard me. I know how boooorrriiing and dry can technical books of this sort be, but this one -- I actually read the whole of the Introduction chapter (which I do very rarely), then continued on to the first chapter, then the next, and next,... I read through the first 52 pages of the book in just a couple of hours!
The book is very reader-friendly, witty, interesting, and simply great!
I am now in the third year of a Software Engineering course and this book is certainly very helpful. With its help I hope to submit an extremely well readable and structured code to my final year project. I recommend this book to everyone!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Fun and interesting, 25 May 2009
A lot of common sense and stuff a seasoned programmer probably already know (or at least has heard a million times before), but do you really apply all that stuff in your everyday work? A little repetition never hertz, and the book is fun to read and filled with good code examples.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Does what it says on the tin, 3 May 2009
Every so often, a book comes along that codifies best practice in a way that manages to illuminate the path from where things are right now, to a better place that we'd rather be -- things like Fowler et al. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Object Technology Series) or the Gang of Four Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software. This is one of those books. And if much of the material is the sort that seems obvious in hindsight -- well, that is the mark of a well written book, to make the concepts that clear.
Taking a series of real world examples -- open source projects with significant user bases, including FitNesse and JUnit -- a series of worked examples take us from good, or at least adequate, code, to a form which is better factored, and easier to read, with the steps along the way clearly marked. Yes, even some of Kent Beck's code is put under the microscope, and carefully polished that extra stage or two more.
The reader is cautioned that, without working long hours to follow these examples, this will be just another of those feel-good books. I don't quite agree -- spending just a little time to follow the transformations, and then reflecting on one's own outpourings should be enough to make this a feel-bad book. All the sins from obscurely named variables to sprawling functions that gaily mix abstraction levels, we've all done them (especially programming in FORTRAN on minicomputers with slow stacks and a rule of thumb that 1 call ~ 40 loc in terms of performance).
The maxim to take from the book is based on Baden-Powell's "Try and leave this world a little better than you found it", and owes to the same school of thought as "whenever you are in the garden, pull at least one weed". The meat of the book is in distinguishing what are the weeds from the intended crop.
So read it, understand the examples, and then refer to it often -- like the other titles mentioned, it is a reference work, and should join them as among the most thumbed on your bookshelf.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I cannot recommend this book highly enough!, 20 Mar 2009
It is the most up to date and succinct piece of writing regarding the construction of good software from the ground up as well as tackling legacy code. It's jam packed full of gems and practical advice that you can apply immediately. There is no fluff and no waffling, the examples are awesome (all in Java although I code in C#) and apply to "real world" problems that we face every day. There is no way you'll put this book down after reading it and just forget about the lessons like so many other books.
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4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
The bible for writing high quality software, 9 Sep 2008
Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin) is a recognized expert in todays world of software development. His books "Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Practices" and "Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C#" should by now be well known by the majority of serious java and C# developers. I read the latter last year, and I was blown away by Uncle Bob's insight into the process of writing software in a manner, that more or less guarantees success for both the customer and the development company.
When "Clean Code" was published I rushed to buy it, and again I am in awe!
This book book hits the nail on why so many software development projects ends up in pain for the developers as the code rots and becomes unmaintainable. Not only are the symptoms cleary described and analyzed, Uncle Bob also provides the remedy. By breaking down the process of cleaning up code into detecting very specific "smells" and heuristics, and by supplying the reader the tools to fix the problems in the software, the reader automatically becomes empowered, inspired and motivated to go and clean up his or her mess.
I strongly believe, that if all developers were to read this book and start living by the rules stated within, life would improve for every single developer, customers would be able to purchase very high quality software products a lot cheaper, and everyone would benefit.
My applause to Uncle Bob - Thank you for this fantastic work of art!
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