Writing Flexible Code with the Single Responsibility Principle

SOLID Principles and Maintainable Code

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If you’ve been around software for a while, then you’ve almost certainly heard of the SOLID principles. In short, these are a set of principles intended to help developers write clean, well-structured, and easily-maintainable code. In software, as in any intellectual and creative endeavor, there is quite a bit of debate about the “right” way to do things. Different practitioners have different ideas about what is “right”, depending on their individual experiences and inclinations. However, the ideas prescribed by SOLID adherents have been widely adopted in the software community, and agree with them or not, they’re a useful set of principles from which to draw best practices. Moreover, SOLID has been thoroughly integrated into a broader set of Agile development practices and understanding them is thus a virtual requirement in the modern software industry.

Developers and bloggers have written seemingly ad infinitum about SOLID in various places across the web. In researching this article, I encountered many such resources, some of which are cited at the bottom of this article for your reference. So, if the SOLID principles are well-covered elsewhere, why write yet another article about them? In short, for my own edification. Writing about complex…