A fairly quick read, and an interesting one. Structurally, I think this worked well as a book — there’s a flow to it, the sections lead from one to the next quite well — but it also does feel like, both in terms of size and of formatting of the larger section in the middle, like it could’ve been implemented as a deck of cards. Something like the Writer Emergency Pack, but for programmers.
I quite like the choice of the word ‘tidy’, though, which Beck spent some time explaining. In short, it’s meant to emphasize that it’s just a little change. This book isn’t about massive refactorings; it’s about moving a couple lines around so a function is easier to read, adding or removing a couple comments so that a new reader can easily understand what’s going on in this file, extracting a few lines into a helper function. Small changes, things that just take a moment and could, in theory at least, be a no-review-needed PR.1 Well worth the hour or two it takes to read; check it out.2
- A concept I’m not entirely sold on, still, but I may be biased by being the kind of person who enjoys reviewing PRs. ↩
- This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩