My notes from the foreword of "Clean Code"

A while ago, I bought a book called “Clean Code”. It’s a handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship and it’s written by Robert Cecil Martin, also known as “Uncle Bob”. He is an American software engineer and instructor.

This book has been in my closet for a quite sometime now and today I finally had the ‘time’ and mindset to start reading it.

I always find it difficult to remember the information from a thick book for a long period. I eventually forget or twist the information. Finding the time and energy isn’t a big deal for me, because I’m always very enthusiastic about the newly learned knowledge and gained insights. Just reading and going quickly over the chapters goes pretty well until months have passed and I completly forgot what I had read and learned.

To avoid this and actually learn something from the book for the long term, I have decided that I am going to take notes of each chapter and do some extra research about the topic. By adding references to the page numbers, I also make it incredible easy to find a topic and reread the material again. This way have a collection of references to important information.

Today, I started with the foreword. It’s written by someone else, named James O. Coplien.

Notes

“Small things matter”

This book is about humble concerns whose value is nonetheless far from small.

One of the major pillars of TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) is the set of so-called 5S principles:

• Sort (Seiri)
• Set In Order (Seiton)
• Shine (Seiso)
• Standardize (Seiketsu)
• Sustain/Self-discipline (Shutsuke)

Wikipedia page about this methodology

“Be honest in small things”

This means being honest:

• to the code
• to our colleagues about the state of our code
• with ourselves about our code

“Did we do our best to leave the code base cleaner than we found it?”

Please buy this book if you want know more about the above notes. These notes only serve as a quick reference to important information in the book. If these notes are too insightfull and in conflict with the copyright, please get in touch with me.