Photo by Alice Hampson on Unsplash

Summary 🔖

The other day my manager recommended me the following book, in order to strengthen my coding skills: "The Art of Readable Code". I am coding for a long time, but no one really had to review my code, so I ended up getting some bad habits and sometimes generating code which is tough to read.

The Book Content 📙

This book do not explain you algorithms or a specific language. It focuses instead on good practices which are valid for (almost) all modern languages. (Note: I know only a few modern languages, so I cannot verify this claim.). It is separated into a few different parts:

• Surface-level improvements (variable names, code aesthetics, ...)
• Simplifying loops and logic
• Reorganizing code
• Other Topics (Writing tests, run-through of complex example)

What I remembered from this book 🤔

Before reading this book, I thought that arguments about code styling were pretty useless and a waste of time, kind of "is spinach better than broccoli?". This book's examples showed me that following some patterns do improve readability. Other patterns do degrade readability, which I didn't really realize before. I will remember that:

• When seeing some statements logically related, group them and add a comment before
• Try to keep classes / functions at being responsible of one thing at a time
• Eliminating variables where they don't add much insight (e.g. used only once). Add some in other places where they improve readability
• Test for edge cases early and exit with return, break or continue. (Which for some reason I found "dirty" before).

But most importantly of all, now I will add another pass after writing my code, and I will know what to look for. Before my code writing was: think -> code -> test -> fix -> submit, while from now on I will be able to add another pass of refactor/simplify. Knowing what to look for during this phase will hopefully improve readability

A few points to note 🖐️

Everything is not perfect, and there are still some points I find could have been better in this book:

• This book is not language specific, but it is still better to know the basics of JavaScript and C++ to understand the examples. If you don't understand the languages you will miss some points and subtleties...
• Some advice is pretty generic, and end up being more subjective than anything else.
• In particular, the naming of variables and functions end up being pretty specific. I am not a native English speaker, neither are my co-workers, so this ends up being a point of discussion pretty often. (As an aside, I needed a bit of time to understand that when Japanese people of my company say 'neck', they mean 'bottleneck' and other non intuitive abbreviations...)

Final advice 👏

All in all, this is a book pretty easy to read which contains some gems and some useful examples. I still have doubts about some topics (e.g. naming variables and functions) which still end up containing a hefty dose of objectivity. This book can still be helpful in avoiding big mistakes, rather than trying to get the perfect code.

Let's see in a few months if I read some parts again, to make sure that the content is well digested!

Here is the link one more time: "The Art of Readable Code".