“Clean Code” Book Club: Conclusions

The final chapters of Clean Code contained step-by-step examples for code refactorings in chapters 14–16, as well as a list of rules in chapter 17. Both were not quite suitable for the format of a book club, so we worked through one of the refactoring chapters together but stopped after that.

Now that we’re done, I spent the past six weeks or so pondering how I feel about this book. My initially high hopes for the book were disappointed by chapter 2 or 3. Over the following chapters, I increasingly found myself wondering, who this book is for. I wouldn’t recommend it to experienced programmers, who would get very little out of it. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to beginners—while there is plenty of good advice here, there’s also enough bad advice¹ and utterly terrible example code that it might do more harm than good. Maybe an intermediate Java programmer might get something useful out of it? But for RSEs like us, it was definitely not a useful book.

Despite all that, I still enjoyed the book club immensely. I’m a physicist by training; and while I got a lot of experience writing software during my PhD and postdoc, I received almost no formal training in software development. Being self-taught used to give me impostor syndrome—still does, sometimes—especially when I started working as a Research Software Engineer. Reading through this book, realizing I was already familiar with most of the contents, discussing it with colleagues and being able to make convincing arguments where I disagree with advice in the book … all this gave me a lot more confidence. More confidence, almost certainly, than I would’ve gotten from reading a better book.

So for me, at this particular time in my life, this may have been just the right book? Very strange, indeed.

1. or at least, advice that should be taken with far more grains of salt than the disclaimer in chapter 1 provides ↩