Good Code, Bad Code

by Tom Long

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

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

In Good Code, Bad Code you’ll learn how to:
+ Think about code like an effective software engineer
+ Write functions that read like a well-structured sentence
+ 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 you and your team’s time

Genres: Programming, Technology, Computer Science, Nonfiction, Software, Coding

376 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Alessandra Anyzewski]

It is introducing concepts of code quality. The topics covered are pertinent, but I was not excited about the examples. The sequence did not sound natural for learning. And I have to confess a little prejudice of mine about the examples being in Java 😅

[Charlie]

I've coached many developers through the transition from boot camp/university-level coding to professional-grade software engineering, and this book is the perfect support for that process. The book introduces key principles for producing readable, testable, maintainable code, but also stresses the importance of good judgment and evaluating each piece of code case-by-case. Highly recommended.

[BabyLunLun]

Superb book . Make sure to read this to impress your interviewer

Clear and concise explanation with easy to understand example. Its not in the list of Must read book for Software Engineers but I think it truly deserve to be on there .

Understanding the reason behind all those fundamentals code practice makes me appreciate the art of it and its all thank to this book

[Viktor Lototskyi]

A good book on various matters that have to do with code and development: quality, abstractions, modularity, readability, error handling, unit testing and so on.

Not that there's a revelation on any particular topic, but the content is well structured, up-to-date and code examples are to the point.

It'll be useful for junior-intermediate developers and tech leads/people managers who are coaching developers and need to do occasional talks on these topics.

[Weijian]

This is a quite unique book among so many titles in IT/compute tech/software. Supposing you have studied data structure/algorithm in university, have learned and used one or more programming languages for several years, and you have played around various frameworks in your favoured language, then this book could be of extra value to you!

To me, reading this book is partly like going through again those hard lessons I have learned in my years as a software engineer. But I can still find something new, something validating my feelings, and something convincing me that I probably have not done correctly so far.

A great read. Really enjoys!

[Enrico]

Highly recommended read for anyone starting coding or with years of experience. University never prepares you to write readable, safe and non-error-prone code, the type of code that tech companies want, and this book gives all the principles and frameworks to do that and more. I have been working in tech for many years and have lots of experience as both an engineering lead and an engineering manager, and I wish all of my colleagues thought about coding and designing software the way this book describes.

[Neha Shaah]

Good coding examples, bad coding language. Haha, no this book is really a good one and I'd recommend it to developers in their early career .. who have worked on some projects but have yet to make a career journey as a developer. This book emphasis how relying on comments or fine prints leads you to pitfalls.

[Valentina]

This was a very good read to get back into the topic of coding and software design after years working as a consultant. I liked the examples in particular, they are really useful to ground the concepts in reality and fix them in memory.

[Marrion Luaka]

Nothing ground breaking, mainly expected advice on how to write cleaner more readable code. I'd compare it to Robert C. Martin's Clean Code but with more specific examples. Overall, it was well written and easy to follow along. The code samples were realistic too. I recommend it.

[Jing]

I really enjoyed this book. I think it's a really good read and a rare find. Will change the way you code and the way you approach engineering problems.

This book doesn't just give you a few tips on how to write good code; it provides a mental framework you can use to reason about topics such as code quality and good engineering practices. This is a really critical skill to grow from a graduate computer science student to an experienced engineer and technical lead.

Too many books focus on specific technologies and very few focus on the methodologies behind everything related to software engineering. This book is one of the few and is definitely worth a read!

[Marine]

Facile à lire, plein d'exemples, et surtout des conseils pragmatiques sur des problématiques qu'on rencontre souvent. (utiliser les bonnes couches d'abstractions, code modulaire, etc..)

[Simon Lee]

this book contains a lot of good advice that is worth practising.

[Deepak Kumar]

Nice book on "coding style" that explains which strategy to use in which situation using various examples.

[Steve]

Good and bad practices discussed. Could have been half the length.