Review of Clean Code by Bob Martin
Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The first half of this book is well worth a read. Then I was reminded of Martin Fowler’s (I think) comment that the original Design Patterns Elements of Reusable Software book was a response to the limitations of C++. It dovetailed so well into Java because Java has a lot of the same annoying limitations, and in some ways is even harder.
The latter section of the book contains some worked examples that I didn’t always agree with because they seemed to be totally over done. A lot of the refactorings came from limitations in the language and even then felt arbitrary and not that “clean”, more like differences of opinion.
In light of this I think the book would have been better titled Clean Java, and then we’d all know where we stand. Have to say I was disappointed by the case studies. I think if you’re a jobbing Java programmer you will get a real benefit from this book. I use dynamic languages like Ruby and most of the problems described in need of refactoring just never happen.
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