Oldy but a goody kids. Dating allllll the way back to 1999. Object oriented development was starting to come into it’s own. A lot of developers were making the move, which in turn meant that a lot of bad code was starting to be created and put into use.
I’m a huge fan of Martin Fowler. I follow his Twitter feed. I read his books. And I’ve always liked this one in particular. It has a place of honor on my book shelf. I use at as a reference from time to time, and I’ve found it’s particularly useful when trying to explain a specific something to another developer. Due to this, we selected this book for a weekly technical book club.
And… as it turns out… this was a book no one wanted to talk about. Despite all of the good advice in here, there really weren’t many issues anyone felt like throwing down about. We had a pretty good debate surrounding commenting vs. self-documenting code (I tend towards the later). There was also a good conversation surrounding the use of polymorphism as, or rather in place of, switch statements (and conditionals in general). Aside from that, most of the book generated a collective, “Yup! That’s a good idea!”.
If you reached this point in the article, and if you don’t already own this, be sure to add a copy to your library. It is a terrific resource and reference, like Head First Design Patterns, that can really help boost your vocabulary. With 12 years under it’s belt though this book now falls under foundational for an Object Oriented developer vs. revolutionary.
