Category: Book Reviews

Through the years I have bought numerous books, I just love to read and here are just some of my favourite books, in no particular order.

• Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET
• Azure In Action
• Asp.Net 4 and VS 2010 Web Development OverView
• Programming Entity Framework
• Improving .Net Application Performance and Security
• Performance Tuning and Optimizing Asp.Net Applications
• Professional Asp.Net Design Patterns
• Pro C# 2010 and the .Net 4 Platform
• Code Complete
• Clean Code
• 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

Clean Code by Robert C Martin

Let me start by saying that I highly recommend this book to anyone writing code who wants to learn to write better, cleaner code.

What the Book Covers

Chapter 1 Clean Code – Different authors of programming books give their take on what their idea of clean code is as they try to help you become a good programmer.

Chapter 2 Meaningful Names – Gives you a break down of what to try to avoid calling method names, variables, and such like and helps you to try to use meaningful names as is the chapter name.

Chapter 3 Functions – Hints that functions should be small and that they should only do one thing and do that one thing well and gives examples of poor functions and how to refactor them in to new functions which have one function. Again I think this is a particularly good idea even though sometimes not always practical.

Chapter 4 Comments – Before I read this book I would normally add a comment the code I was working on but after reading this chapter I realised that comments in your code can be bad. It’s better to try to write self documenting code and try not to litter your code with comments, how many times have you changed code and then changed the comment of the author who wrote the code in the first place (hats off if you always do that everytime, including stored procs?), so code with the wrong comments can lead to issues themselves.

Chapter 5 Formatting – Covers different types of formatting your code as well as indentation and is pretty irrelevant with Visual Studio and such editors.

Chapter 7 Error Handling – Returning Null is bad but passing Null into a method is worse – code with endless checks for Null should be refactored – yep have to agree.

Chapter 9 Unit Tests – Covers the concepts of how to write good unit tests.

These are just a few hand-picked chapters which I thought were very good indeed.

Summary
This book is my favourite book, even ahead of Code Complete which I thought was an excellent book in its own right. Keep your code simple, use meaningful names and don’t use comments when there is no need to.

It’s the kind of book you will go back to again and again and there aren’t that many books which you don’t mind reading cover to cover again.

I’m sure you will enjoy this book and definitely learn something.