Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Liebe Leserinnen, liebe Leser,
ich bin glücklich, zu verkünden, dass ich ein anderes Buch zu Ende gelesen habe, und deswegen landet jetzt darüber eine Rezension auch. Diesmal war geht es um Clean Code von Robert C. Martin. Es war eine lange Weile her, seitdem ich eine Rezension geschrieben habe, weil ich mich in C und Matlab Grundlagen vertiefte, und deswegen hatte ich keine Zeit für solche Sachen. Als eine “Diversitätsunterbrechung” konnte ich dennoch endlich dieses Buch lesen, und die schriftliche Ergebnis ist im Folgenden zu lesen. Wie immer, ich veröffentliche das auf Englisch, weil die auf goodreads.com gefundene Fassung ursprünglich auf Englisch geschrieben wurde.
If you are a novice or somewhat experienced programmer, then this book is for you. As an early programmer, you probably have little understanding of what is considered to be “good code”, so this book will give you a pretty good general guide for things you will need to look out for when writing code. Despite the fact that it demonstrates concepts through Java, it is still quite comprehensible, so don’t get scared if you don’t know Java (neither do I). Also, this book doesn’t only introduce you some heuristics, but also tries to explain what kind of mindset you need to write clean code, so this book is definitely worth your time.
It is not perfect though. For instance, I was constantly wondering what experienced programmers could get out of this. For novices like me, the gains are obvious, but for people coding for a while now, I’m not sure.
Also, I found some examples to be driven to the extremes. For example, I wasn’t really convinced of needing to over-split functions into tiny one-liners, and in the process unnecessarily obscuring intent by vertically stretching an otherwise obvious concept. There are a ton of good advice here, don’t get me wrong, but some of them just don’t feel to be completely justified.
In later parts of the book it becomes obvious though, that one must find balance in code refactoring, so the heuristics presented in the book should be considered as guidelines rather than rules (basically the book somewhat corrects itself).
Another thing I noticed is, that despite the fact, that the author(s) did a pretty good job at keeping most of the examples general, there were some cases where the examples are just too Java specific to my taste, so they simply became boring.
So is it worth reading? Of course it is. Is it perfect? No it isn’t, but that shouldn’t discourage anyone.
Vielen Dank fürs Lesen.
P.S.: Als ein kleiner Bonus und um die Beendung des Lesens dieses Buches zu feiern, stelle ich ein Foto vor, das ich heute aus dem Fenster aufgenommen habe:
Ein Schneefall am Anfang December. Nicht jedes Jahr bringt Schnee so früh (in diese Gegend).