A Philosophy of Software Design, 2nd Edition

I discovered this work by first watching John present his material at a Google Talk series on software design. When he said he had tried for years to find a book that encapsulated key software design principles and failed, I really resonated with his approach. I have been looking for ages for a standard text to refer to my mentees, and this book really encapsulates all the key design principles I have spent years fine tuning myself. I wish I had had this book when I was starting out! I particularly like John's writing style, it is as clear and concise as the software design principles he advocates. The Book is a print on demand book with a simple but effective design, printed on quality paper. I read it from end to end in a week of lunchtimes, because each chapter focuses on one design principle and is only a few pages long, and while there are small examples for everything, it is not over cluttered with intricate detail. It is just the right level for a beginner or an expert to benefit from alike. The examples are well chosen from a knowledge-base of hundreds of student and industrial projects that John has direct involvement with, and every example clearly supports the principle being presented. I will be recommending this book to everyone that I mentor and support, and I recommend that you buy it too. If you are a beginner, it will give you much to think about and practice as you grow into your career. If you have been developing software for a few years, it will make you re think some of the things you do and adjust your style for the better. If you are experienced, it will encapsulate succinctly all the principles you have spent years perfecting, and give you an easy way to pass on these principles to those around you that you mentor.

A book that falls in the same category as "clean code", except it gives better advice with actual justifications. Unlike "clean code", this book actually tells you why a certain way is better rather than just stating it as some biblical truth. It also presents overarching theory that all the concepts sit on and with which you can take to make actually day to day decisions that aren't based on hard rules. The main concept presented is the idea of complexity, reducing the complexity that is exposed to developers by abstracting it away into parts that can be used as a black box and is seen by few. The book is good for both junior and senior engineers and will make you rethink how you and your team work, in particular constantly improving the code base rather than just looking to address tech debt at some future point in time. At the very least you will come out with a different opinion on some topics, refreshed some good practices, and learn good terminology to describe difficult concepts. People who complain that this book encourages long functions and classes really miss the point. The point is that functions and classes should do one thing in isolation. That's the goal, not to make it short. A lot of the time functions are shorter as a result of following that objective, but you are optimizing for things doing one thing not shortness within itself. Separating functions out into blocks that do nott stand alone as independent units just makes things harder to understand and read as you have to jump about in the file, or into other files. If you look at some of the before and after examples that do this in clean code, they are actually worse a lot of the time after. If you have this opinion, when you read this book be open to changing your mind. If your argument is "functions should be 20 lines long at most because that's what I read in clean code and anything else is wrong" you are really limiting yourself and hurting the people who read your code. It was also very refreshing to finally hear a counter argument to the dogmatic application of TDD. To conclude, if you would like to learn how to write clean code with actual generalisable theory over using hard rules such as never comment, a function should be x lines long, and classes should be y lines long, then this is the book for you.

The book covers some good engineering practises for software design. It is refreshing to see that many views I have held for years is shared by the author as well. for e.g.: I always thought Java IO libraries were bit over engineered and could have been made simpler, glad to see author also shares the same view. Views on design patterns overuse or on TDD , I fully agree. I find it hard to go with the suggestion of designing general solution all the time. Though I agree with the overall concept, designing a generic solution first, will put too much burden on the engineer (who need not be domain expert), as result will end up with wrong or abstraction (most of the time!).

Probably the best general software design book I've ever read. Condenses everything I've been struggling to express about design over 35 years in the IT industry. I wish more junior developers would read this. Comments in code are indispensable. Small methods aren't always good. Lots of very sound, carefully reasoned practical advice here. Deep general purpose modules with small interfaces, well documented. Sadly most code is written once, quickly, in a tactical fashion, then ignored while people move on to newer things. A refreshing change from the "Uncle Bob " dogma. Thoroughly recommended.

The author is not afraid to go against the common idioms of "good design" and he defines a new way to look at problem decomposition and abstractions. The way developers get thought to design systems in conjunction with software development trends too often leads to creating over-complicated software. Any software which is too complex to maintain will eventually be rewritten. The author explains a different approach on how to decompose problems and he defines a methodology to achieve optimal results over time. It also provides a list of red flags which, when found in a software project, enables the developer to timely recognize and correct design issues before they go out of hands. I'd recommend this book to the seasoned developer or software architect who has already seen a number of projects and designed a few systems. Which such experience the reader will quickly recognize many of the bad ways to design a system and the type of problems which bad design leads to.

only just started reading the book however, found by accident that my kindle doesnt show the pictures.. so, it doesnt make half as much sense as when reading on my pc....

Reading and understanding this book will be the best investment in your career, it will help you become a better engineer and recognise and identify red flags in your codebase. Moving towards a 'Documentation-driven development' approach will help you think about the users of your interface first, just like TDD does, with the key difference that you get to spend more time in the design phase with this approach and less time being a 'feature factory', which makes a real difference in the long term. Buy this book for yourself and for your team

I'm stuck between 3 and 4 stars. As others said, it's a good book overall. There are some design principles that make a lot of sense and also, in retrospective, explain why some Java libraries are so bad ( you can figure it out for yourself after reading it ). However, I couldn't get over the fact that a substantial part of this book is mostly about comments - got to a point where I was so fed up, I was legit skipping pages to get to more meaningful content.