During the lack of time of a typical software engineer’s day job, it is easy to forget some simple concepts or behaviors that can make your code a better place.
Tidy is the concept of making small structural changes that could be easily reversible and don’t change the behavior of the code. Sounds familiar? Yes, it’s almost the same concept that we should know as refactoring, but unfortunately, the refactoring concept has been lost over time, nowadays taking days to be completed and changing the behavior.
The book presents 30 “tidys” in its first half, each simple as an extract method or renaming a symbol, every tidy unlocking more tidys, and making your code better. The book’s second part focuses on a more theoretical approach to software complexity and how software generates value.
Many books will take more than five hundred pages to talk about the same topic, and that is where one of the best characteristics of this book shines, it’s very well resumed, without large code snippets or something like that, you can easily read it in one day and learn/remember something.
Tidy First (2023) by Kent Back is excellent to read and remember how small changes in code structure can make a huge impact over time, and it also teaches you how to do it and become a better software developer.
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