Prefactoring

This book makes a lot of things (like error handling) clear. However, it may seem not deep enough. I give it 5 stars because it did not disappoint me at all.

This book does what it sets out to do: it describes some wise ideas for software design. (If the name of the book bothers you, get a grip: at least it's short.) Some of these ideas may be familiar to experienced developers, in which case it's a well-written refresher. For some of the ideas, this may be the first time you've seen them described in that way, and a different perspective is also useful. So, what do I like about this book? - The ideas are practical, common-sense ones. - I like the revisiting of a small number of examples, developing them a little more each time as familiar problems with them are identified. - The book sits comfortably in the world of Agile development, but is not rabid about it. - Design diagrams are used sparingly, enough to educate and remind, but not overwhelmingly so.

When I first heard the term "prefactoring" I thought "Great, yet another marketing buzzword created solely to sell books and services." Was I ever wrong. Prefactoring summarizes, and provides concrete examples and advice, for developing high-quality code. This book covers the fundamentals which every developer should know but often don't. Among the multitude of techniques, Pugh describes how to reduce coupling, increase cohesion, take an interface-centric approach, and write literate code. Yes, the book is aimed at junior to mid-level developers, but even senior developers will gain a few new insights and will likely be reminded of several good ideas which they had long forgotten. I'm shocked by some of the misleading reviews which this book has received (one even reviewed other reviews which misrepresented the book to begin with, what's that all about?). Pugh is very clear about refactoring, and I quote "Refactoring is the practice of altering code to improve its internal structure without changing its external behavior." So, with all due respect to the people who claim that Pugh misrepresented refactoring, did you even read the book? The term "prefactoring" may achieve buzzword status - not because it's a marketing scam but because it represents a collection of solid technical concepts. Prefactoring is a "must read" book for anyone new to software development, and a "should read" book for everyone else. If everyone understood and followed the ideas described in this book, we'd see a doubling of productivity within the IT industry.

Ken Pugh's Prefactoring: Extreme Abstraction, Extreme Separation, Extreme Readability: it provides software developers with insights based on author Pugh's own real-world experiences and it draws important connections between designs and real-world applications. Learn when to produce code and when to leave out troublesome lengthy versions, how to identify extreme naming problems, and how to separate policy from implementation to keep code more readable.