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Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Martin Fowler,

Kent Beck (Contributor)

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Dec 25, 2020 Michael rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: programming

I went into this book with pretty large expectations. I had heard the book was great, but I realize now I never really heard why it was great. The rumor mill just told me that it was the book to read if you wanted to learn refactoring.

Unfortunately, I found myself very disappointed by the book. The first four chapters could be compared to Clean Code in many ways; they introduce some good practices of coding and how to perform a refactoring safely. But beyond that it is just a reference list of a I went into this book with pretty large expectations. I had heard the book was great, but I realize now I never really heard why it was great. The rumor mill just told me that it was the book to read if you wanted to learn refactoring.

Unfortunately, I found myself very disappointed by the book. The first four chapters could be compared to Clean Code in many ways; they introduce some good practices of coding and how to perform a refactoring safely. But beyond that it is just a reference list of all the different types of refactoring. On some level I understand why he went into as much detail as he did, but there were a few that just felt extremely long-winded for how simple they are. I don't really need an example of `rename field`.

But that was another criticism I had about this book; the refactoring difficulty levels were wildly different. Some of the refactoring steps were so simple that any modern IDE can handle it without even pausing (rename field, move declaration, delete unused code), while others were very highly involved changes that could have long reaching impacts across the entire system, most notably "introduce polymorphism". So in terms of the book, renaming a variable is equivalent to introducing a series of classes and polymorphism into your application. Perhaps what the book needs is some sort of difficulty rating, that way I at least get the sense the author realizes not all refactorings were created equal.

Rants about difficult levels aside, this book really does turn into a reference book. It simply lists every refactoring, no matter how trivial, and tells the motivation, process, and an example (or several). That's it. The motivation is almost never more than a paragraph or two, so in terms of hard thinking, you won't be doing much for this book. I would certainly not recommend this book to a programming book club; we found ourselves struggling to come up with topics of conversation at times since everything was so straightforward. And we found ourselves skipping most, if not all, of the examples by the end of the book. It just wasn't worth the time to read how to do the refactoring.

I won't say that the book is bad, because it isn't. And it certainly isn't a bad concept. But I will say it wasn't an exciting book. I didn't learn anything new that I'm excited to implement in my daily programming life. It's like brushing my teeth; it's not fun, it's not exciting, but it's very important to do. ...more

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