Confirmation of/by experience
This book will not teach you new things, if you are an experienced programmer. But ... this book is also worth to be read for experienced programmers, as they will find the confirmation for their methods they have "invented" by themselves during the last decades sitting in front of the monitors in order to produce clean code.
Short: for beginners a must-read for learning, for experienced ones a must read for teaching.
Don't get the Kindle version
[Kindle Version Review]
The one star is not a reflection of the content of the book, which is clearly a very fine treatise on coding practices, but of the fact that the Kindle version is almost impossible to read. Code samples are truncated, in a variable-width font, and have less-than and greater-than symbols missing. References in the text often refer to listings that are not closely located with that text (eg. "see Listing 4-7 on page 71" is almost impossible to find on a Kindle without single-paging).
This is a book that requires a lot of page flipping, and shouldn't be available on the Kindle unless the publisher is willing to put in some effort to address these readability issues.
Very motivating
Found myself laughing many times when reading some of these examples of horrific code and practices. I'm currently in a project that has every bad example in it. This book has given me hope for the future and the motivation to make my situation better.
Give this book to your co-workers for your own sake
If only all code was so Clean. There is nothing in here that any developer can't grasp, and there is nothing in here that every developer shouldn't know.
Considering the amount of time wasted trying to comprehend legacy code while implementing enhancements and fixing defects, it's almost criminal to ignore this book's insights. Oh, and by legacy code I'm talking about that code your wrote this morning.
A terrific guide for Java programmers
This is primarily a book about code style. That sounds dull, but it doesn't have to be. Rather than just saying "do this," this book provides rational arguments to support patterns that make code much, much easier to read, remember and refactor. It's easier to write, too--unlike other style guides which say to comment everything (even getters and setters!), Clean Code advises you to use comments sparingly; usually, the code should speak for itself. The book concludes with actual case studies from large, open-source projects where messy code is cleaned up. This is an extremely useful exercise.
If you're a solo programmer, I'd recommend perusing this book. And if you're on a team, give this book to everyone else on it. You might just end up with some better programmers.
(40 reviews)
