I was lent this book over a year ago by my work, but for one reason or another, I’ve never quite got round to reading it (I blame Brandon Sanderson!). But having now read it, I do wish I’d got around to reading it before.

Read now, the book for me reinforced a lot of the things that I’ve learnt over the last year, as well as introducing a few new ideas, but if I’d read it a year ago I think I would have appreciated the things I was learning a lot more.

The book introduces many ideas for practices that we, as professional developers, should be following to ensure our code remains clean. Just because it works doesn’t mean it’s the best it can be, and in order to maintain the code for future years and future developers, we need to try our best to keep the code clean so that it’s more future-proofed, and also less likely to contain bugs.

Reading through the book brought to mind so much code that I’ve worked on in the past, both worked on by myself and by developers from the past, and made me think of habits that I’m guilty of that I’m going to try my hardest to change.

The only negative for me in this book was that the code examples were written in Java which I’m not familiar with – obviously it’s not too hard to pick up the meaning of the code, but I think I would have been happier with examples written in C# instead – and as I would recommend this book to any new programmer, it could be more off-putting for them. But I’d still recommend it anyway!