Press releases

The Art of Readable Code--New from O'Reilly Media: Simple and Practical Techniques for Writing Better Code

Sebastopol, CA—As programmers, we've all seen source code that's so ugly and buggy it makes our brains ache. Over the past five years, authors Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher have analyzed hundreds of examples of "bad code" (much of it their own) to determine why it's bad and how it could be improved. Their conclusion? You need to write code that minimizes the time it takes someone else to understand it—even if that someone else is you.

The Art of Readable Code (O'Reilly Media, $34.99 USD) focuses on basic principles and practical techniques you can apply every time. Using easy-to-digest examples from different languages, each chapter demonstrates how you can make your code easy to understand.

"Most engineers just don't think about readability as consciously as they should," says Boswell. "I wanted to write a book that would bring awareness to the issue, but also give specific tips and guidance on how to do it. Specifically, I wanted to create a practical book that a junior developer could start reading and immediately improve the readability of their code. There is also a real need for programmers to read this book. The majority of code out there is unreadable.

"After reading this book," Boswell says, "you'll be able to look at your own code and realize why it might be unreadable. More importantly, you'll be armed with a lot of principles and techniques that will let you comb through your code to make it better."

• Simplify naming, commenting, and formatting with tips that apply to every line of code
• Refine your program's loops, logic, and variables to reduce complexity and confusion
• Attack problems at the function level, such as reorganizing blocks of code to do one task at a time
• Write effective test code that is thorough and concise—as well as readable

Advance Praise
"Being aware of how the code you create affects those who look at it later is an important part of developing software. The authors did a great job in taking you through the different aspects of this challenge, explaining the details with instructive examples."
—Michael Hunger, software developer