Refactoring
Martin Fowler
37 people recommended it in 21 threads, 2010–2025.
2 commenters pushed back on it — worth reading the threads.
What people on Hacker News said
Studying refactoring gives devs a much stronger ability to talk about, study, understand, reason about, and modify code.
Refactoring concentrates on changing existing code vs. greenfield development, which tends to be far more useful in practice.
For helping realize that in all the books telling me how to write good code, explaining language constructs, and working as a software developer, none of them ever made it clear to me that programmers spend less than half their time writing new code from scratch.
For showing me that programming involves revising and improving far more than opening up an editor to a new file in an empty repo.
The book is similar to Fowler's Refactoring in that it provides some core thought processes / ideology and then a long list of heuristics and techniques for revising/updating legacy code.
Martin Fowler's Refactoring is pretty good on the technical side of things.
Refactoring Improve the design of the existing codebase (Making changes safely without breaking the code)
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler
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