How we did it:
For any feedback, any questions, any notes or just for chat - feel free to follow us on social networks
Michael C. Feathers
The average book on Agile software development describes a fairyland of greenfield projects, with wall-to-wall tests that run after every few edits, and clean & simple source code.
The average software project, in our industry, was written under some aspect of code-and-fix, and without automated unit tests. And we can't just throw this code away; it represents a significant effort debugging and maintaining. It contains many latent requirements decisions. Just as Agile processes are incremental, Agile adoption must be incremental too. No more throwing away code just because it looked at us funny.
Mike begins his book with a very diplomatic definition of "Legacy". I'l skip ahead to the undiplomatic version: Legacy code is code without unit tests.
Before cleaning that code up, and before adding new features and removing bugs, such code must be de-legacified. It needs unit tests.
To add unit tests, you must change the code. To change the code, you need unit tests to show how safe your change was.
The core of the book is a cookbook of recipes to conduct various careful attacks. Each presents a particular problem, and a relatively safe way to migrate the code towards tests.
Code undergoing this migration will begin to experience the benefits of unit tests, and these benefits will incrementally make new tests easier to write. These efforts will make aspects of a legacy codebase easy to change.
It's an unfortunate commentary on the state of our programming industry how much we need this book.
Martin Fowler, Kent Beck
Users can dramatically improve the design, performance, and manageability of object-oriented code without altering its interfaces or behavior. "Refactoring" shows users exactly how to spot the best opportunities for refactoring and exactly how to do it, step by step.
Kent Beck
Write clean code that works with the help of this groundbreaking software method. Example-driven teaching is the basis of Beck's step-by-step instruction that will have readers using TDD to further their projects.
Alfred V. Aho
Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools, known to professors, students, and developers worldwide as the "Dragon Book," is available in a new edition. Every chapter has been completely revised to reflect developments in software engineering, programming languages, and computer architecture that have occurred since 1986, when the last edition published. The authors, recognizing that few readers will ever go on to construct a compiler, retain their focus on the broader set of problems faced in software design and software development.
David Vandevoorde, Nicolai M. Josuttis
With the greatly increased use of templates, there is a real need in the C++ community for this information. This book is the next C++ classic, acting as both a complete reference as well as a tutorial. It emphasizes the practical use of templates, and includes real-world examples.
Bjarne Stroustrup
Offers information on using the C++ programming languge using the new C++11 standard, covering such topics as concurrency, facilities, standard libraries, and design techniques.