Recommenders/CleanCoder

Temporary Page: A Review of "The Clean Coder"

You care about clean code? How much do you care about being professional? And what the heck does professional mean for a programmer? In slightly more than 200 pages Robert C. Martin gives you a quite good understanding what professionalism means. He describes his understanding of being professional in an amusing, sometimes quite ironic but almost always very striking way.

Who's the target audience of this book? Well, it depends on your personal background and to which degree you already buy in into principles such as pair programming, TDD, sustainable pace .... - and you live them!

If you already live these principles, I think this book will widely attest you that you're doing well. Thus, for all of you that want to get a confirmation of their processes and attitudes - this book is for you.

If you are a computer science student who's close before leaving university and you have serious plans to write at least a few lines of code - this book is a must read. It reminds me of myself a few years ago when many of my discussions with fellow students focused on what criteria a future employee has to satisfy - like regular training courses, certifications etc. One of our greatest concerns was that we would get stuck on the experience level we learned at university. An employer should provide us with a perspective! Boy, if you read this book it becomes pretty clear how odd this attitude was (but not uncommon for students I guess). Uncle Bob leaves no doubt that programmers have to take care for their education by themselves. In their spare time! And professionalism is an attitude one has to learn and which goes by far over the principles of Clean Code and being a good programmer.

If you are already a programmer but feel unprofessional or strongly believe that development goes wrong in your department, you should also dare to get copy. You won't find any clean code examples but a set of problems caused by humans and human interactions. After reading the book you may figure out that much more social stuff is involved in programming than you may expect. Coding is just more than the sum of it's bits and bytes.

As a team lead this book might contain some interesting findings. Since Uncle Bob draws many of this conclusions from his own experiences (in the past as a young scholar) and explains some problems by some very common scenarios you may take away some interesting thoughts here too.

In any case, the book is worth reading but quite different from all the previous books like Clean Code, Agile Development etc. Thus, I would rate if four out of five stars. It contains lots of things to think about but it's not that mind-changing as previous books: Commons sense - but excellent worked up.