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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I think one should always be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater[0].

Do I force myself to follow every single crazy rule in Clean Code? Heck no. Some of them I don't agree with. But do I find myself to be a better coder because of what I learned from Bob Martin? Heck yes. Most of the points he makes are insightful and I apply them daily in my job.

Being a professional means learning from many sources and knowing that there's something to learn from each of them- and some things to ignore from each of them. It means trying the things the book recommends, and judging the results yourself.

So I'm going to keep recommending Clean Code to new developers, in the hopes that they can learn the good bits, and learn to ignore the bad bits. Because so far, I haven't found a book with more good bits (from my perspective) and fewer bad bits (from my perspective).

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_throw_the_baby_out_wit...

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I'm completely with you here. Until I read Clean Code, I could never really figure out why my personal projects were so unreadable a year later but the code I read at work was so much better even though it was 8 years old. Sure, I probably took things too far for a while and made my functions too small, or my classes too small, or was too nitpicky on code reviews. But I started to actually think about where I should break a function. I realized that a good name could eliminate almost all the comments I had been writing before, leaving only comments that were actually needed. And as I learned how to break down my code, I was forced to learn how to use my IDE to navigate around. All of a sudden new files weren't a big deal, and that opened up a whole new set of changes that I could start making.

I see a lot of people in here acting like all the advice in Clean Code is obviously true or obviously false, and they claim to know how to write a better book. But, like you, I will continue to recommend Clean Code to new developers on my team. It's the fastest way (that I've found so far, though I see other suggestions in the comments here) to get someone to transition from writing "homework code" (that never has to be revisited) to writing maintainable code. Obviously, there are bad parts of Clean Code, but if that new dev is on my team, I'll talk through why certain parts are less useful than others.

I would recommend Code Complete 2 over Clean Code.

Por que no los dos? Read them both. Take the good parts of each. Ignore the bad parts of each.

That was my thought - neither one is SICP, you can finish reading both in a week.

Perhaps I'm a slow reader, but is Code Complete 2 really a book you finish over a weekend? It's north of 850 pages long.

Perfect, Its definitly my personal impression, but while reading the post it looks like the author was looking for a "one size fits all" book and was dissapointed they did not find it.

And to be honest that book will never exist, every knowledge contributes to growing as a professional, just make sure to understand, discuss, and use it (or not) for a real reason, not just becaue its on book A or B.

Its not like people need to choose one book and follow it blindly for the rest of their lives, read more books :D

In my opinion the problem is not that the rules are not one size fits all, but that they are so misguided that Martin himself couldn't come up with a piece of code where they would lead to a good result.

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