Book review - Clean Code

After a few years of putting it off I’ve finally got round to reading Clean Code by Uncle Bob. I’m glad I did. It’s one of a handful of books that regularly appears on lists of must read programming books.
Why do I like this book?

• The main reason is that it’s fundamentally about how to write simple code that humans can understand. The importance of this cannot be overstated. It’s not enough that code compiles and meets all the requirements, code must be easy for other developers to understand.
• It’s about details, and I like details. Many of the code smells and heuristics covered in Clean Code are small details. For example, unnecessary comments, vertical distance between variable declaration and usage, code formatting, method size. They may be small but when you add them all up, they make a significant difference to your code
• Each chapter is short, easy to read and to the point. While the book as a whole isn’t short, about three hundred pages excluding appendices, you can sit down for half and hour, take in a chapter and learn something from it.
• There are plenty of examples. Each chapter contains plenty of small examples and the last two chapters rework larger pieces of code using some of the principles covered earlier in the book.