Clean Code Principles: A Software Engineer’s Guidelines to Writing Better, Greener Code
Learn the main principles of clean code from the book Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, and get tips for making your code more maintainable, scalable, and loosely coupled.
These days, everyone in the software development world is wondering the same question:
How clean is my code?
How can I ensure my code is as clean and structured as possible?
How can I make it more scalable, long-term maintainable, greener, and loosely coupled?
Clean code is a codebase that is easy to read, understand, and maintain. It is well-organized, well-formatted, and free of errors.
Clean code is also code that is flexible and extensible so that it can be easily adapted to change. Fundamentally, we’re trying to make it not just clean but also scalable, maintainable, and overall good for the world.
Writing clean code is important for a number of reasons. First, clean code is less likely to contain bugs. Second, clean code makes it easier (and faster) to fix bugs when they do occur. Third, clean code is easier to read and understand, which makes it easier for other developers to work on and maintain. Finally, clean code is more flexible and extensible, which makes it easier to add new features and functionality in the future.
Clean Code Principles by Robert C. Martin
The book “Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship” by Robert C. Martin is a seminal work (strongly influencing later developments) in the field of software development. The book introduces a set of principles and practices that promote clean code, which I will summarize for you and keep short.
Martin is well known in the programming world and still, his book is part of the many software job interviews today. Martin argues that clean code is a form of craftsmanship, and requires attention to detail and a commitment to continuous improvement.
He advocates for good practices like refactoring to keep codebases clean and manageable over time. Those principles and practices became rules and a must in today's software development world. But do you know them all?
Here are some of the most important principles that he strongly promotes:
- Give meaningful names, describing the field by the function it has: Give variables, functions, classes, and other entities in your code meaningful names. This will make your code easier to read and understand for both yourself and other developers.
- Functions should do only one thing! Each function should perform a single, well-defined task. This will make your code more modular and reusable, and it will also make it easier to test.
- Small functions: Functions should be small enough to be easily understood and maintained. This typically means that functions should be no more than a few dozen lines of code long. Do not risk getting lost in long, complex functions and classes later! Everything can be decoupled.
- Comments: Use comments to explain your code and to document your design decisions. Especially if the meaningful name is not enough or self-descriptive. This will make your code easier to read and understand for both yourself and other developers.
- Formatting: Use consistent formatting throughout your code. This will make your code more readable and easier to scan. Sync formatting setup with other teammates. Formatting is making your code look good and not only functionally good.
- Error handling: Handle errors gracefully and informatively. This will make your code more robust and less likely to fail.
- Unit testing: Write unit tests for your code. This will help you to catch bugs early and to ensure that your code is working as expected. Take care of the test coverage. use various tools to automate test coverage and running tests.
- Refactoring: Regularly refactor your code to improve its readability, understandability, and maintainability. Update dependencies and keep the code up to date.
Additional tips for writing clean code
In addition to the principles outlined above, there are several other things that you can do to write clean code.
Here are a few tips:
- Modularize your code. Break down your code into smaller, self-contained modules, to achieve more independence between the parts of the code, promoting loosely coupling and easier to extend.
- Use interfaces to decouple your code. This will make your code more flexible and reusable.
- Use dependency injection to inject dependencies into your code at runtime. This will make your code more testable and maintainable.
- Document your code. Write comprehensive and up-to-date documentation for your code, for both yourself and other developers.
- Avoid using magic numbers.
- Break down complex problems into smaller, more manageable tasks.
- Design your code for low coupling and high cohesion, and follow the Single Responsibility Principle.
- Use recommended architectural design patterns and use design patterns to solve common software design problems. This will make your code more reusable and maintainable.
- Use consistent indentation and spacing.
- Use a code formatter to ensure that your code is formatted consistently.
- Regularly review your code for potential improvements.
- Use Lint and other code improvement/ code analysis tools.
- Automate building, testing, and deployment of apps, packages, and containers of all sorts.
- Be mindful of how fast and efficient your software is, not just to potential users, but to the world too.
- Practice to be more skilled in writing good quality code every day. Skilled programmers can optimize code in any language to reduce resource usage and improve efficiency.
Writing clean code is an important skill for any software engineer. Clean code is easier to read, understand, and maintain, which can lead to a number of benefits, such as fewer bugs, faster development time, and lower maintenance costs.
The principles outlined in the book Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship are a great place to start when learning to write clean code. Follow these principles, along with the additional ones I’ve included, and you will write code that is more readable, understandable, and maintainable.
This approach will, with no doubt, result in fewer bugs, faster development times, and lower maintenance costs!
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