Refactoring

I have taken a forced break from F# due to actual work arising. Will I go back? I hope so, but the chances of it being used to replace our C# front end are doubtful.

Anyway I wanted to take the time to talk about my thoughts on refactoring. Every junior developer will hear the talk about it. Generally it will come from a senior developer and I know mine used a whole mess of buzz words, Dirty Code, Smelly Code etc, and the goal of it was to make clean code. They are 100 percent right, if you haven't had this talk, find a senior developer you respect and bring it up.

So I had my talk in my first job and it did inspire me, I wanted to write awesome code, clean, sleak fast, BUT that feeling quickly went away as I had no idea how, sure I could pick some things up here and there, remove duplication and make sure my naming convention was A) consistent with everything around me and B) expressive enough that my intentions were clear.

So time moved on and I came to my new job, refactoring as it always does was brought up again but this time the talk was replaced with this book. http://martinfowler.com/books.html#refactoring

Through the programming world a lot of people say that book x or book y is a must have and a must read. I cannot comment about most of those books, but I honestly think that Martin Fowlers book is.

This refactoring book is not a lot of preaching about the awesomness that is refactoring, although it does explain the use of it, It is mostly examples, here is situation x, it is bad because of y, here is how we clean it up.

The book also provides naming conventions for standard refactorings and trys to explain when they are useful but more importantly when they are not.

The first 3/4's of the book are relevant to all developers, the last 1/4 I stopped reading, not because it was not good, but I had no scope on it, there were discussions on design patterns that I never implemented so I could not understand why things were broken and if I couldn't understand that, there was no point me reading about the refactoring.

The book examples are written in Java, a language I do not know (I know right, weird) but I didn't find that it hurt my understanding of what was being said.