Developer Best Practices

Often, software engineers and architects work with large, complex code bases that they need to scale and maintain. With this cookbook, author Maximiliano Contieri takes you beyond the concept of clean code by showing you how to identify improvement opportunities and their impact on production code. When it comes to reliability and system evolution, these techniques provide benefits that pay off over time.

Using real life examples in JavaScript, PHP, Java, Python, and many other programming languages, this cookbook provides proven recipes to help you scale and maintain large systems. Every section covers fundamental concepts including readability, coupling, testability, and extensibility, as well as code smells—symptoms of a problem that requires special attention—and the recipes to address them.

As you proceed through this book, refactoring recipes and the variety of code smells increase in complexity. You will:

• Understand the benefits of clean code and learn how to detect code smells
• Learn refactoring techniques step by step
• Gain illustrative code examples in several modern programming languages
• Get a comprehensive catalog of common code smells, their impacts, and possible solutions
• Use code that's straight to the point, favoring readability and learning

Widely considered one of the best practical guides to programming, Steve McConnell’s original CODE COMPLETE has been helping developers write better software for more than a decade. Now this classic book has been fully updated and revised with leading-edge practices—and hundreds of new code samples—illustrating the art and science of software construction. Capturing the body of knowledge available from research, academia, and everyday commercial practice, McConnell synthesizes the most effective techniques and must-know principles into clear, pragmatic guidance. No matter what your experience level, development environment, or project size, this book will inform and stimulate your thinking—and help you build the highest quality code.

• Discover the timeless techniques and strategies that help you:
• Design for minimum complexity and maximum creativity
• Reap the benefits of collaborative development
• Apply defensive programming techniques to reduce and flush out errors
• Exploit opportunities to refactor—or evolve—code, and do it safely
• Use construction practices that are right-weight for your project
• Debug problems quickly and effectively
• Resolve critical construction issues early and correctly
• Build quality into the beginning, middle, and end of your project

In Five Lines of Code you will learn:

• The signs of bad code
• Improving code safely, even when you don’t understand it
• Balancing optimization and code generality
• Proper compiler practices
• The Extract method, Introducing Strategy pattern, and many other refactoring patterns
• Writing stable code that enables change-by-addition
• Writing code that needs no comments
• Real-world practices for great refactoring

Improving existing code—refactoring—is one of the most common tasks you’ll face as a programmer.

Five Lines of Code teaches you clear and actionable refactoring rules that you can apply without relying on intuitive judgements such as “code smells.” Following the author’s expert perspective—that refactoring and code smells can be learned by following a concrete set of principles—you’ll learn when to refactor your code, what patterns to apply to what problem, and the code characteristics that indicate it’s time for a rework.

Practical techniques for writing code that is robust, reliable, and easy for team members to understand and adapt.

In Good Code, Bad Code you’ll learn how to:

• Think about code like an effective software engineer
• Write functions that read like well-structured sentences
• Ensure code is reliable and bug free
• Effectively unit test code
• Identify code that can cause problems and improve it
• Write code that is reusable and adaptable to new requirements
• Improve your medium and long-term productivity
• Save yourself and your team time

The difference between good code or bad code often comes down to how you apply the established practices of the software development community. In Good Code, Bad Code you’ll learn how to boost your productivity and effectiveness with code development insights normally only learned through careful mentorship and hundreds of code reviews.

In Modern Software Engineering, continuous delivery pioneer David Farley helps software professionals think about their work more effectively, manage it more successfully, and genuinely improve the quality of their applications, their lives, and the lives of their colleagues.

Writing for programmers, managers, and technical leads at all levels of experience, Farley illuminates durable principles at the heart of effective software development. He distills the discipline into two core exercises: learning and exploration and managing complexity. For each, he defines principles that can help you improve everything from your mindset to the quality of your code, and describes approaches proven to promote success.

Farley’s ideas and techniques cohere into a unified, scientific, and foundational approach to solving practical software development problems within realistic economic constraints. This general, durable, and pervasive approach to software engineering can help you solve problems you haven’t encountered yet, using today’s technologies and tomorrow’s. It offers you deeper insight into what you do every day, helping you create better software, faster, with more pleasure and personal fulfillment.

• Clarify what you’re trying to accomplish
• Choose your tools based on sensible criteria
• Organize work and systems to facilitate continuing incremental progress
• Evaluate your progress toward thriving systems, not just more "legacy code"
• Gain more value from experimentation and empiricism
• Stay in control as systems grow more complex
• Achieve rigor without too much rigidity
• Learn from history and experience
• Distinguish "good" new software development ideas from "bad" ones

Objects are the central concept of languages like Java, Python, C#. Applying best practices for object design means that your code will be easy to read, write, and maintain.

Object Design Style Guide captures dozens of techniques for creating pro-quality OO code that can stand the test of time. Examples are in an instantly familiar pseudocode, teaching techniques you can apply to any OO language, from C++ to PHP.

Corporate and commercial software-development teams all want solutions for one important problem—how to get their high-pressure development schedules under control. In RAPID DEVELOPMENT, author Steve McConnell addresses that concern head-on with overall strategies, specific best practices, and valuable tips that help shrink and control development schedules and keep projects moving. Inside, you’ll find:

1. A rapid-development strategy that can be applied to any project and the best practices to make that strategy work
2. Candid discussions of great and not-so-great rapid-development practices—estimation, prototyping, forced overtime, motivation, teamwork, rapid-development languages, risk management, and many others
3. A list of classic mistakes to avoid for rapid-development projects, including creeping requirements, shortchanged quality, and silver-bullet syndrome
4. Case studies that vividly illustrate what can go wrong, what can go right, and how to tell which direction your project is going
5. RAPID DEVELOPMENT is the real-world guide to more efficient applications development.

Serious developers know that code can always be improved. With each iteration, you make optimizations—small and large—that can have a huge impact on your application’s speed, size, resilience, and maintainability.

In Seriously Good Software: Code that Works, Survives, and Wins, author, teacher, and Java expert Marco Faella teaches you techniques for writing better code. You’ll start with a simple application and follow it through seven careful refactorings, each designed to explore another dimension of quality.

Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering.

How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world's leading practitioners construct and maintain software. This book covers Google's unique engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization.

You'll explore three fundamental principles that software organizations should keep in mind when designing, architecting, writing, and maintaining code:

• How time affects the sustainability of software and how to make your code resilient over time
• How scale affects the viability of software practices within an engineering organization
• What trade-offs a typical engineer needs to make when evaluating design and development decisions

Computer science theory quickly collides with the harsh reality of professional software development. This wickedly smart and devilishly funny beginner's guide shows you how to get the job done by prioritizing tasks, making quick decisions, and knowing which rules to break.

In Street Coder you will learn:

• Data types, algorithms, and data structures for speedy software development
• Putting "bad" practices to good use
• Learn to love testing
• Embrace code breaks and become friends with failure
• Beginner-friendly insight on code optimization, asynchronous programming, parallelization, and refactoring

Street Coder: Rules to break and how to break them is a programmer's survival guide, full of tips, tricks, and hacks that will make you a more efficient programmer. It takes the best practices you learn in a computer science class and deconstructs them to show when they’re beneficial—and when they aren't!

This book's rebel mindset challenges status quo thinking and exposes the important skills you need on the job. You'll learn the crucial importance of algorithms and data structures, turn programming chores into programming pleasures, and shatter dogmatic principles keeping you from your full potential. Welcome to the streets!

Most software developers waste thousands of hours working with overly complex code. The eight core principles in The Art of Clean Code will teach you how to write clear, maintainable code without compromising functionality. The book’s guiding principle is simplicity: reduce and simplify, then reinvest energy in the important parts to save you countless hours and ease the often onerous task of code maintenance.

Bestselling author Christian Mayer leverages his experience helping thousands perfect their coding skills in this new book. With expert advice and real-world examples, he’ll show you how to:

• Concentrate on the important stuff with the 80/20 principle — focus on the 20% of your code that matters most
• Avoid coding in isolation: create a minimum viable product to get early feedback
• Write code cleanly and simply to eliminate clutter
• Avoid premature optimization that risks over-complicating code
• Balance your goals, capacity, and feedback to achieve the productive state of Flow
• Apply the Do One Thing Well philosophy to vastly improve functionality
• Design efficient user interfaces with the Less is More principle
• Tie your new skills together into one unifying principle: Focus

This Python-based guide is suitable for programmers at any level, with ideas presented in a language-agnostic manner.

Programming is a creative act. These techniques will help you maximize the power of creativity to improve your software and your satisfaction in creating it.

Inside The Creative Programmer you’ll discover:

• The seven dimensions of creativity in software engineering
• The scientific understanding of creativity and how it translates to programming
• Actionable advice and thinking exercises that will make you a better programmer
• Innovative communication skills for working more efficiently on a team
• Creative problem-solving techniques for tackling complex challenges

In The Creative Programmer you’ll learn the processes and habits of highly creative individuals and discover how you can build creativity into your programming practice. This fascinating new book introduces the seven domains of creative problem solving and teaches practical techniques that apply those principles to software development.

Hand-drawn illustrations, reflective thought experiments, and brain-tickling example problems help you get your creative juices flowing—you’ll even be able to track your progress against a scientifically validated Creative Programming Problem Solving Test. Before you know it, you’ll be thinking up new and novel ways to tackle the big challenges of your projects.

Messy code is a nuisance. "Tidying" code, to make it more readable, requires breaking it up into manageable sections. In this practical guide, author Kent Beck, creator of Extreme Programming and pioneer of software patterns, suggests when and where you might apply tidyings to improve your code while keeping the overall structure of the system in mind.

Instead of trying to master tidying all at once, this book lets you try out a few examples that make sense for your problem. If you have a big function containing many lines of code, you'll learn how to logically divide it into smaller chunks. Along the way, you'll learn the theory behind software design: coupling, cohesion, discounted cash flows, and optionality.

This book helps you:

• Understand the basic theory of how software design works and the forces that act on it
• Explore the difference between changes to a system's behavior and changes to its structure
• Improve your programming experience by sometimes tidying first and sometimes tidying after
• Learn how to make large changes in small, safe steps
• Approach software design as an exercise in human relationships