Klaus Haeuptle - Clean ABAP: A Style Guide for Developers

Clean code has been a staple of agile software development for many years. Code is more often read than its written, and so its critical that your code is easy to read and that it clearly conveys what its trying to achieve. With a relentless focus on readability and understandability, clean code ultimately has a huge impact on the maintainability and testability of a code base.

This book is a compendium of rules, guidelines, and recommendations for how to make your ABAP code clean: readable, understandable, maintainable, and testable. It discusses detailed code patterns and idioms, as well as more high-level design considerations. It also explores some processes and organizational concerns that have an impact on the implementation of clean code.

This book is mainly written for ABAP developers and testers with a penchant for development. Youll find many code samples, as the book is very technical in nature.

Clean ABAP is for novice as well as senior programmers. Depending on your skill level, you may benefit from different topics, and you may feel drawn towards different centers of focus. However, the general ideas address all developers, independent of experience.

We also encourage architects to read this book and understand clean ABAP. Some topics in this book transgress in the architects realm of large-scale objects such as packages and object-oriented design. Even if you dont code at all, you should be able to connect to your team and understand at least the main ideas of clean ABAP.

In this book, we included topics that should help you to get started with clean ABAP at any time, in any kind of project, with any kind of team.

This book begins with an introduction to clean ABAP and a general discussion of the ABAP language in talks about how to learn and implement clean ABAP, whether thats at the individual, team, or organization level.

: How to Get Started with Clean ABAP, to get more specific guidance on which topics to pursue at which time. The last chapter is important for anyone willing to learn and implement clean ABAP at any level in an organization.

Lets look briefly at what is covered in each chapter:

• : Introduction
  This chapter introduces the clean ABAP concept, describes why its important to write clean code, and how to get started. Youll also learn about other style guides and learning resources that can be used to expand your understanding beyond this book.

• : The ABAP Language
  This chapter offers general guidance about using ABAP and sets up the context in which to apply clean ABAP practices. Youll learn about special considerations for legacy code and performance, and understand overarching methodologies for producing readable, functional code.

• : Classes and Interfaces
  Youll learn to apply clean ABAP concepts to classes and interfaces in this chapter. The chapter explores classes and interfaces from the perspective of object-oriented programming and teaches you how to use classes and interfaces appropriately to create clean code.