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 design as a human activity with diverging incentives
Kent Beck is a programmer, creator of Extreme Programming, pioneer of software patterns, co-author of JUnit, rediscoverer of Test-Driven Development, 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract and now the *Tidy First?* series of books on software design. Beck is also alphabetically the first signatory of the Agile Manifesto. He lives in San Francisco, California and works for Studio Beck, teaching skills helping geeks feel safe in the world.
