I had a tough time deciding whether I really liked or It was amazing. I liked the writing style of the book. Its simple, clean, and well crafted.

First few chapters of the book makes good practical advice from naming variables-functions-classes to writing functions to testing. Most of the smells and heuristics I found in these chapters can be found in real-world as well.

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test. - Ray Ozzie, CTO, Microsoft Corporation

In the next few chapters of the book contains some very good points. Some of them are quite new and very useful for me when applying design principles (such as SRP, OCP, DRY, SOC) to keeping the code base small, simple, and clean.

Most freshman programmers (like most grade-schoolers) don't follow this advice particularly well. They believe that the primary goal is to get the program working. Once it's "working", they move on to the next task, leaving the "working" program in whatever state they finally got it to "work". Most seasoned programmers know that this is professional suicide.

These parts of the book are *fantastic* and well justified though most of the examples are pure Java-specific. Latter sections of the book is more into Java centric, and thought of skimming few sections (disappointingly) but was compelled to continue reading. The book must titled "Clean Code (Java)". Though this book makes more sense for Java developers at the beginners and intermediate levels, I would definitely recommend the book to any .NET C# developers as well.

All in all, it was well worth a read! I got a clear picture of how developers end up with smelly code and how we can refine and "clean" it up.

/KP
Review: Clean Code by Robert C. Martin