Tidy First?

A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design

By: Kent Beck

Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne

Messy code is a nuisance. "Tidying" code, to make it more readable, requires breaking it up into manageable sections. In this practical guide, author Kent Beck, creator of Extreme Programming and pioneer of software patterns, suggests when and where you might apply tidyings to improve your code while keeping the overall structure of the system in mind.

Instead of trying to master tidying all at once, this book lets you try out a few examples that make sense for your problem. If you have a big function containing many lines of code, you'll learn how to logically divide it into smaller chunks. Along the way, you'll learn the theory behind software design: coupling, cohesion, discounted cash flows, and optionality. This book helps you:

- Understand the basic theory of how software design works and the forces that act on it

- Explore the difference between changes to a system's behavior and changes to its structure

- Improve your programming experience by sometimes tidying first and sometimes tidying after

- Learn how to make large changes in small, safe steps

- Approach software design as an exercise in human relationships

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2024 Kent Beck (P)2024 Ascent Audio

Great bookbut wished Kent read it

I needed this book.

I've been thinking about coupling for a long time (shorter than Kent by far). But a lonesome voice calling out isn't worth ad much as a lonesome voice calling out and referring to book written by Kent Beck.

I just wished Kent read them himself. The reader is great! But Kent's tonality is a bit more striking. Aggressive, but warm.

do yourself a favor and skip the audio book

Let me be absolutely clear here, the content is very good, useful, applicable, ... Really love it, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the book, would recommend it...
The performance, voice, reading, is also actually quite good, clear, understandable, ... again, nothing wrong with it.

Except for the fact that the content just doesn't lend itself to be listened to. Too many "parentheses open", "... close", ... read out loud code doesn't work 🙈 (of course, this might be just me)

so, do yourself 2 favors, skip this audio book... and buy the printed version, as it is really good (I've already ordered a paper version)