steve kwan user experience designer

Review: Refactoring

(January 11th, 2006 - 10:40PM)

Martin Fowler's modern software engineering classic, Refactoring, contains little but common knowledge.

(2 / 5 stars)

If you're not a software engineer, you can stop reading right now. This post isn't for you.

This is a review of Refactoring, a book written by Martin Fowler which is well-known in programming circles. The book attempts to describe the process of refactoring, or improving the design of existing object-oriented code. The first part of the book is an introduction to refactoring, the second is a catalogue of known refactorings, and the third is a collection of essays written by well-known OOP experts.

Refactoring explains an alternative method of developing software: clean up the design as you go. In the age of evolutionary development, this might not be so unusual. What is unusual is that the book says that design mistakes aren't expensive.

Perhaps I'm not in the best position to review Refactoring, because I was initially trained with OOP. If you're relatively new to OOP or if you learned to program in the procedural days, Refactoring might have some insight for you. But as someone with a bit of experience in this sort of development, I didn't get much from the book. Especially taking into account the hefty price tag, I wouldn't recommend it.