Code Complete on my bookshelf
Another Amazon’s 5 star rating book on my bookshelf. I have just finished this huge, over 800 pages, heavy as hell book. Well, in my opinion, it could be less than 300 or maybe even 200 pages, as most of it is so obvious that I just couldn’t belive someone has written book about it, hmmnn, maybe I’m wrong and maybe lots of people find it usefull, but still for me just 3 stars ;).
What I have gained from reading this book? For sure I have stronger muscles on my back as I did carry it on the tube almost everyday :), but beside that this book is of course not that bad and at the end of the day I would say it was a valuable read. I have enjoyed especially the chapter about code improvemens like refactorings and tuning and that is less than 150 pages! The rest, well, I think it’s good to brush up on some things a bit but if you have written a program with, lets say, at least 500 lines of code you are completly aware what correct intedation, comments, naming variables etc means not only for other people reading your code but especially to you!
One very good thing about this book is the fact that the author included tonnes of references to other books and research papers – heh, reading will never stop!
I like this book too, even though, as you say, it feels a bit padded with obvious stuff.
One thing that bothers me day to day is that the author’s guidelines for code formatting (especially where to put linebreaks in long method calls) are very pleasing to the eye, but IMPOSSIBLE to reproduce with Eclipse’s code formatters. I use a custom formatter configuration, but the linebreak rules still aren’t flexible enough.