Last week I finished reading The clean coder written by @unclebobmartin. The book’s subtitle: “A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers”, summarizes the book quite good.

Throughout the book @unclebobmartin tells about his own experiences during his career. Also he illustrates the points he wants to make with excellent example discussions between (project) managers and developers. These example stories are quite entertaining and make the book easy to read.

The first few chapters discuss how a professional developer behaves as a person. It’s all about managing expectations & making sure that you’re in the right state to do your job. After that some practices that improve the quality of your work are introduced. Examples practices are TDD, testing in general and estimation. The last chapters discuss how to behave in a team. A embarrassing paragraph in these chapters is called “Degrees of failure”. In that part @unclebobmartin basically explains how the education system fails to educate software developers.

It’s a nice book to read and has nice suggestions how software developers can improve their work and become craftsmen. However many of these tips are not new to me. They can be found in the enormous blob of blogs about agile / lean / etc. development. Only the estimation chapter gave me some real new information. Because the book is written in @unclebobmartin’s distinctive style I still recommend the book. The pragmatic programmer is a different league though.