Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction by Steve McConnell Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
Book Review: Great Information
Summary: 5 Stars
Code Complete is full of great information about quality coding practices. It should be required reading for any programmer.Book Review: A must-have for everyone serious involved in software development
Summary: 5 Stars
It's amazing how much common sense, best practices and good advices is packed in this book.Book Review: Excellent advice, but somewhat repetitive
Summary: 4 Stars
This book presents numerous tips, hints and practices that minimize the effort needed to understand and maintain software code. The author seems to be a strong advocate of self-documenting code that doesn't need comments to explain its purpose. As a result, his suggestions are mostly centered around this idea. Sometimes he tends to take things to the extreme (e.g. declaring a class that includes a separate object that implements it), but most of his ideas and propositions make sense.
The author sometimes repeats a lot of his suggestions and tips in some form or the other, which may get annoying. This does however, allow the reader to read the book in a non-sequential fashion.
Occasionally, the book may present contradictory suggestions. At one point for example, the author strongly advocates passing individual parameters to routines in order to enhance decoupling (instead of passing objects that contain these parameters). At a later point however, he argues (correctly) that passing objects into routines is OK if it satisfies the abstraction of the routine. A more consistent picture would be nice to have in future editions.
Overall, a great book for those looking to improve their coding styles and practices.
Book Review: One of the Best
Summary: 5 Stars
This dense tomb has insights on software development packed into every page. You could base an entire career off of it.Book Review: as good as everyone says it is
Summary: 5 Stars
Code Complete pops up regularly on the lists of the 'read this book or you'll never get a job and everyone else will laugh at you' genre, so if you're easily influenced, like me, you may approach this book with an air of duty rather than anticipation. Fortunately, despite its heft, this is well worth the plaudits that have been heaped upon it. I actually enjoyed this more than The Pragmatic Programmer and Programming Pearls, two books often mentioned in the same breath as this tome.
CC covers pretty much every part of the software development lifecycle, from planning to code reviews to testing. These are all pretty good discussions, but the best bit is definitely the chapters on coding. Most of the examples are in Visual Basic or Java, so you'd do well to know one of those languages.
When it comes to object modelling, there's actually a reasonable set of guidelines harvestable from literature, and languages tend to diverge more on issues of packaging, so CC is at its best at the lower level procedural details of code layout, formatting, loop construction, optimisation and so on. Many books claim to provide coding guidelines, but don't do much beyond stating the obvious like (for Java) "use camel case for variable names", "start class names with capital letters" and "avoid Hungarian notation". CC is different because it actually provides useful recommendations. As an example, there's a very good discussion on when and where the use of loop-breaking constructs like break and continue ('next' in Ruby and Perl) are appropriate. Few (if any) other books provide this sort of practical detail.
It's well-written, with just the right amount of humour in its exhortations - the withering references to coders who investigate loop bugs by randomly adjusting the termination criterion up or down by one until it works raised a wry smile from this reviewer.
To summarise, this is a collection of best practices distilled from a pretty huge amount of reading, and is genuinely helpful. I would certainly point any programming beginner at this book.