Code Complete review

If you’re a beginning programmer you won’t understand a lot of the material, and if you are experienced, the book will only confirm what you already know. - Robert Harvey (?)

I can’t agree more with the quote above. I had two approaches to reading Code Complete, first one at my senior year at University where I was asked to read parts of it for one of the courses and the second one just now for the 12 Books Challenge. Robert Harvey got it just right I was unprepared for this book at University, but now, having 1.5 years of experience was probably the best time to read that book.

Sense of completeness

The great thing about Code Complete is that it touches the most important aspects of producing good, maintainable code, starting from doing the ground work on the architecture and system prerequisites.

How this book will make you a better programmer? It will tell you how important is the software design stage of the project and why introducing bugs at this stage costs way more than introducing bugs in production stage. You will also learn what’s wrong with the statement:

float temp_var = 4.0f;

then you will learn how to work with fellow developers, why use version control, how to refactor… You will basically learn everything! And you know what’s the best thing about this book? It provides huge amount of scientific sources for all the hard data.

I’m not kidding, this book has 21 pages of cited sources.

Summary

My personal rating for this book is 10/10. It made me a way better developer than I was before I read this book. If you’ve been programming for some time then for sure you heard about this book. Perhaps someone at some point recommended it for you. You know what? They were right. Go, read it!