Clean Code
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship is a book that every developer should read, especially at the beginning of their careers when many basic programming concepts need to be settled.
The following is a short summary with the main ideas from the book. Below you can also find my talk from the Agile Madrid User Group about this book, which covers many different examples.
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Meaningful names
The first step to writing good code is that names have meaning. The variables, methods and classes should have a good name to know why they exist and what they do. Tim Ottinger’s Rules for Variable and Class Naming.
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Functions
The functions have to be small, should do one thing and do it well, maintaining a single level of abstraction. Also, we must try to reduce the number of arguments.
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Comments
Don’t comment bad code, rewrite it.
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Formatting
The formatting of the code has one purpose: readability. The newspaper metaphor: when reading code, the main functions should appear first, and we can go into details below.
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Objects and data structures
Objects hide their data and expose functions to operate with them, on the other hand, data structures expose their data directly.
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Error handling
Try to separate the logic of our application from the exception handler and don’t pass or return null values from functions.
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Unit test
Tests are a very important part of building applications. Ideally, do TDD and create test code as good as the code of the rest of the application.
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Classes
Classes must be small with high cohesion.
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Emergence
To create a good emergent design we should run all tests, eliminate duplication, express the intention in the code, and minimize the number of classes and methods. These are Kent Beck’s Four Rules of Simple Design.
July 11, 2011 | @ArturoHerrero