code simplicity book review

Thu, Oct 10, 2013

Code Simplicity: The Fundamentals of Software by Max Kanat-Alexander is crisp book about writing better software.

The book is just 88 pages, but insights are useful for any software engineer. Author is creator of bugzilla project.

Whenever I come across bold statements in the book, I would sit and think for 2 minutes to correlate with my programming experience. Most of the time I was able to come up with valid example.

This book is highly recommended for programmers who had spent significant time reading other programmers code. If you are an experienced programmer you can consider the points in the books as to validate your current beliefs. I tend to agree on all of the points mentioned in the book and corelate with open source projects in positive and negative sense.

Few of my favorites:

• Everybody who writes software is designer.
• Design is not democracy. Decisions should be made by individuals.
• There is something about future you don’t know.
• Be only as generic as you know you need to be right now.

Rating: ****