front matter

 

preface

What does a software developer actually do for a living? “Implement software” is the most common answer to this question. But what does that mean? Is it only writing code? Well, no. While it is true that code is the result of everything a software developer does, the activity of writing code takes only a small part of a software developer’s working time. Most of a software developer’s time is actually used designing solutions, reading existing code, understanding how it executes, and learning new things. Writing code is the result of a software developer successfully accomplishing all of these tasks. Therefore, a programmer spends most of their time reading existing solutions rather than effectively writing new capabilities.

Clean coding as a subject has, in the end, the same purpose: teaching developers how to write easier-to-read solutions. Developers realize that it’s more efficient to write an easier-to-read solution from the beginning than spend time trying to understand it later. But we need to be honest and admit that not all solutions are clean enough to quickly comprehend. We’ll always face scenarios in which we will need to understand the execution of some foreign capability.

acknowledgments

about this book

Who should read this book

How this book is organized: A roadmap

About the code

liveBook discussion forum

Author online

about the author

about the cover illustration