Clean Code Quotes

“Be prepared to work hard while reading this book. This is not a “feel good” book that you can read on an airplane and finish before you land. This book will make you work, and work hard. What kind of work will you be doing? You’ll be reading code—lots of code. And you will be challenged to think about what’s right about that code and what’s wrong with it. You’ll be asked to follow along as we take modules apart and put them back together again. This will take time and effort; but we think it will be worth it.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Without tests every change is a possible bug. No”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“It is a myth that we can get systems “right the first time.” Instead, we should implement only today’s stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow. This is the essence of iterative and incremental agility.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“One of the more common motivations for writing comments is bad code.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Consider this book a description of the Object Mentor School of Clean Code. The techniques and teachings within are the way that we practice our art. We are willing to claim that if you follow these teachings, you will enjoy the benefits that we have enjoyed, and you will learn to write code that is clean and professional. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that we are somehow “right” in any absolute sense. There are other schools and other masters that have just as much claim to professionalism as we. It would behoove you to learn from them as well.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“The moral of the story is simple: Test code is just as important as production code. It is not a second-class citizen. It requires thought, design, and care. It must be kept as clean as production code.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“So, another way to know that a function is doing more than “one thing” is if you can extract another function from it with a name that is not merely a restatement of its implementation”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Every system is built from a domain-specific language designed by the programmers to describe that system. Functions are the verbs of that language, and classes are the nouns.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Consider, for example, the truly hideous practice of creating a variable named klass just because the name class was used for something else.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Code, without tests, is not clean. No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean. Dave”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“That these acts are simple doesn’t mean that they are simplistic, and it hardly means that they are easy.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“if I must encode either the interface or the implementation, I choose the implementation. Calling it ShapeFactoryImp, or even the hideous CShapeFactory, is preferable to encoding the interface.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code. Bad schedules can be redone, bad requirements can be redefined. Bad team dynamics can be repaired. But bad code rots and ferments, becoming an inexorable weight that drags the team down.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Code formatting is important. It is too important to ignore and it is too important to treat religiously. Code formatting is about communication, and communication is the professional developer’s first order of business.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Professionals use their powers for good and write code that others can understand.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Indeed, many of the recommendations in this book are controversial. You will probably not agree with all of them.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“You know you are working on clean code when each routine turns out to be pretty much what you expected.” Half”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Say what you mean. Mean what you say.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Learning to write clean code is hard work. It requires more than just the knowledge of principles and patterns. You must sweat over it. You must practice it yourself, and watch
yourself fail. You must watch others practice it and fail. You must see them stumble and retrace their steps. You must see them agonize over decisions and see the price they pay for making those decisions the wrong way.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“You should be able to run all the unit tests with just one command.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test.” —Ray Ozzie, CTO, Microsoft Corporation”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“In an ideal system, we incorporate new features by extending the system, not by making modifications to existing code.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“For example, class names including weasel words like Processor or Manager or Super often hint at unfortunate aggregation of responsibilities.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“If a test in the same package needs to call a function or access a variable, we’ll make it protected or package scope.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Test code is just as important as production code. It is not a second-class citizen. It requires thought, design, and care. It must be kept as clean as production code.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Try to write tests that force exceptions, and then add behavior to your handler to satisfy your tests. This will cause you to build the transaction scope of the try block first and will help you maintain the transaction nature of that scope.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“We want to avoid forcing our readers to hop around through our source files and classes.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Code formatting is about communication, and communication is the professional developer’s first order of business.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“There was a time, back in the sixties, when commenting-out code might have been useful. But we’ve had good source code control systems for a very long time now. Those systems will remember the code for us. We don’t have to comment it out any more. Just delete the code. We won’t lose it. Promise.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Any comment that forces you to look in another module for the meaning of that comment has failed to communicate to you and is not worth the bits it consumes.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship