Book Review: The Clean Coder

The Clean Coder – A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers is the latest book I have just finished and is the follow-up to Uncle Bob’s Clean Code.

First of all Clean Code is one of my favourite books and when I saw the follow-up I ordered it straight away – for those of you who havent read it, Clean Code covers how professionals program and discusses the do’s and dont’s when writing code.

The Clean Coder discusses how to be a professional programmer, how to deal with conflict, unreasonable managers and how a professional deals with work pressures and so on. The thing to remember for me is that we are professionals and should always try to act as one and do a professional job.

I am currently working as a consultant and have found myself reading the book and finding it very helpful in a number of ways. The chapters on dealing with pressure and working with unreasonable managers did stick out somewhat and also the chapters on estimation and estimating how long something will take has some very interesting ideas.

Like Clean Code this book shares some ideas which not everyone will agree with but the author acknowledges this and never tries to enforce any particular ideas upon the reader.

I like the idea of team building where you have programmers who thrive and bounce ideas of each other, I also think the idea of learing when to say No to management is particularly relevant in our line of work.

The book covers attitude, self-respect and pride in your work and again that sometimes is thrown aside in order to get the job done and that’s fine too as long as you handle it professionally.

Again I recommend this book but I would suggest you read Clean Code first if you havent.

This book can be found here on amazon.com:- The Clean Coder