Introduction
Why read this book
Software design is a craft not a science. To master it you cannot just study a book that explains comprehensively all the theory behind it. You have to read the literature of many great developers, looking for advices that repeat: that's what is currently considered good software design. However, the literature is vast and it takes much time to get the big picture out of single sources. This book makes three promises:
- to be a compendium of what contributes to good software design
- to be very succinct
- to provide trustworthy sources to go deeper
Who should read this book
The book is intended mainly for people who just started their journey into software design or who are in the middle of it. If you have being seriously studying the topic for 5+ years, likely you are not going to find big surprises. However, I still suggest you to go through the table of contents: you might find one or two things worth a quick read. As a last consideration, the book is heavily skewed towards object-oriented programming though many advices apply to all programming paradigms. Code examples are written in Kotlin, but they are very basic so you do not need any prior knowledge (Kotlin enthusiasts will forgive me some syntax choices :) ).
Who I am
My name is Matteo Di Tucci, I currently work at ThoughtWorks. I picked up coding in university because I did not know what to do when growing up. I still do not know, but along the way I pleasantly discovered I like software and its design.
Teach me back
I really appreciate any feedback about the book and my current understanding of software design. You can share any feedback by creating a pull request. If you do not know what a pull request is, take a look here.
Simple code
It is hard to define what good design looks like: nobody was able to come up with a formal definition so far.
An approach I personally like is the C2 Wiki simple code rules.
Simple code:
- Passes all tests
- Expresses intent
- Does not repeat itself
- Does not contain superfluous parts
If a piece of code respects all those 4 rules then we can consider it good code.
This book is divided in 4 chapters, one for each of the simple code rules.