Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design
by: Kent Beck (Author)
Publisher finelybook 出版社: O’Reilly Media; (November 28, 2023)
Language 语言: English
Print Length 页数: 122 pages
ISBN-10: 1098151240
ISBN-13: 9781098151249
Book Description
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
From the Publisher
From the Preface
What is Tidy First?
“I have to change this code but it’s messy. What should I do next?”
“Maybe I should tidy the code before I make the change. Maybe. Some. Or maybe not.” These are questions you might ask yourself, and if there were an easy answer, I wouldn’t have to write a book to cover it.
Tidy First? describes:
- When to tidy messy code before changing what it computes.
- How to tidy messy code safely and efficiently.
- How to stop tidying messy code.
- Why tidying works.
By the end of this book, you will understand:
- The fundamental difference between changes to the behavior of a system and changes to its structure.
- The enabling magic of alternating investment in structure and investment in behavior, as a lone programmer changing code.
- The basics of the theory of how software design works and the forces that act on it.
And you will be able to:
- Improve your own experience of programming by sometimes tidying first (and sometimes tidy after).
- Begin to make large changes in small, safe steps.
- Approach software design as an exercise in human relationships
Audience
This book is meant for programmers, lead developers, hands-on software architects, and technical managers. It is not tied to any programming languages and all developers will also be able to read and apply the concepts in this book to their own projects. This book assumes that the reader is not new to programming in general.
