Boswell Dustin Foucher Trevor - The Art of Readable Code

Copyright 2011 Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher

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Weve worked at highly successful software companies, with outstanding engineers, and the code we encounter still has plenty of room for improvement. In fact, weve seen some really ugly code, and you probably have too.

But when we see beautifully written code, its inspiring. Good code can teach you whats going on very quickly. Its fun to use, and it motivates you to make your own code better.

The goal of this book is help you make your code better. And when we say code, we literally mean the lines of code you are staring at in your editor. Were not talking about the overall architecture of your project, or your choice of design patterns. Those are certainly important, but in our experience most of our day-to-day lives as programmers are spent on the basic stuff, like naming variables, writing loops, and attacking problems down at the function level. And a big part of this is reading and editing the code thats already there. We hope youll find this book so helpful to your day-to-day programming that youll recommend it to everyone on your team.