The Art of Readable Code – Simple and Practical Techniques for Writing Better Code – by Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher – is a book on advice on making your code more readable.
Why would you want your code to be more readable? It might not seem so important while you are coding, specially if you are a solo developer like me. But when you next have to change or debug something in your code, you will be grateful that you spent the extra time. Not only that, but it is much easier to find bugs on readable code.
One book I will always remember is Code Complete, by Steve McConnell. I read it the year after I finished university, and I immediately loved it. It was full of useful techniques and ideas on how to make your code better – more readable, less error prone, better formatted, etc. And it used plenty of studies to demonstrate what really worked.
I bought The Art of Readable Code half expecting it to be a poor version of Code Complete. I was very pleasantly surprised to find to be not only a nice, fun read but also full of interesting ideas and excellent examples.
When I finished, my Kindle version was full of highlights and bookmarked pages.
Highly recommended.
