Book Review: Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Development

Every once in a while, a book is published that is considered a must-read for every JavaScript developer who wants to be able to do his or her job the right way and understand JavaScript the way it should be understood. Well, Clean Code is one of those books, except it’s not just for JavaScript developers. This book will enlighten every programmer and bring them to an understanding of how great programming is achieved in practically any language.

Background

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Development, was written by Robert C. Martin who is the founder, CEO, and president of Object Mentor Incorporated – a consulting firm offers training on software best practices related to C++, Java, OOP, patterns, UML, agile, and extreme programming.

The Book

This book is all about good software development. It takes a close look at what you think you’re doing correctly and shows you what’s wrong with it and how to change it. It demonstrates some of the best practices for modularization, commenting, testing, code organization, and more. It walks through several case studies where it presents some code that doesn’t look too bad to the average developer and shows you where it stinks and how to fix it. The cases aren’t arbitrary code examples, but rather actual code found in open source projects or old projects the author himself previously wrote. This book shows you how to think when approaching a software problem and how to work through it.

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Development
Written by Robert C. Martin
Published by Prentice Hall
Buy on Amazon

Conclusion

If you haven’t read it, you really should. In fact, you should probably talk to your employer about buying copies for everyone in the office (assuming you work in one). I’m highly considering doing that myself. (Stephen, if you read this, let me know. We should definitely look into this.) This book should be required reading for anyone in college or coming out of college and into the workforce.