What Is Clean Code?
Lessons learned from the bible of software engineering
In a field as vast and varied as software engineering, constant reading is essential for building foundational knowledge and exploring branch knowledge. As in any profession, software development has its must-reads, and Clean Code is one of them. The book comes up consistently in Google’s search results for “top software engineering books,” and it’s well-known in engineering circles.
Here are a few lessons learned from engaging with this touchstone for the very first time.
In many ways, Clean Code is structured like an owner’s manual for code. It’s an extremely opinionated book, as most great books are.
Martin describes best practices and deconstructs poor practices, admonishing those who fail to recognize why and how those habits are bad. Martin is open about his failures. Years of reading (and sometimes writing) bad code have made him intent on helping other developers avoid danger. Taken together, the book’s hundreds of recommendations no doubt produce pristine code. That said, most engineers learn the hard way — by suffering through enough bad code that they want to make it better.
But Clean Code is more than a tutorial. It describes not just how but why to write good code. More than rote memorization of rules…
