Current Book

I am reading Code Complete, 2nd Edition (great Valentine’s Day gift Ana! 😉 and must say that it’s much better and far more interesting than I expected it to be. I thought of it as being one of those books that you just have to read, but would probably be a chore to do so. Boy was I wrong.

If you’re in the business of writing software, you DO have to read this. It isn’t a high-level, software design book. Instead, it’s all about the small things you do and decisions you make at the mundane levels of coding – the naming of methods, size of methods, general formatting, comments, etc.

It’s great to see this stuff written down.  In the time I’ve been coding, I’ve noticed myself continually refining my style and gradually honing in on many of the techniques and suggestions recommended in this book.  Now that I’ve seen it written down, I can have more confidence in my style – that it isn’t just my gut feeling about how the code should be written.

I think that if I were running my own shop, I’d put this on a mandatory reading list for all of my developers.   It would fit in nicely with The Pragmatic Programmer and result in better code by better developers.