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Tidy First? by Kent Beck

Tidy First?

A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design

Kent Beck

O'Reilly Media · Print & ebook · November 28, 2023

Messy code is a nuisance.

Programming BasicsSoftware DevelopmentSystems Design
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Who it’s for
A crisp, practice-minded take on software design you can dip into like a toolkit.
Genres
Systems Design, Software Development, Programming Basics
Published
O'Reilly Media, November 28, 2023

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About this book

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.

Continue reading

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

Design, Tidy

A crisp, practice-minded take on software design you can dip into like a toolkit.

Come here for

  • practical design habits
  • cleaner code without theatrics

Expect

  • short, usable ideas
  • straight talk over theory

Where it sits

Systems Design76%
Programming Basics50%
Software Development42%

Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.

Publisher categories

  • Programming Basics
  • Systems Design
  • Web Programming
Authors
Kent Beck
Publisher
O'Reilly Media
Published
November 28, 2023
Format
Print & ebook
Reading lane
Programming Basics