Writing Clean Code

I was shocked to see this book get some negative reviews. Those that blasted Microsoft missed the point. This book provides invaluable advice in a quick read. For example, "If you have to look it up, the code is not obvious," or, "If you find yourself designing a function so that it returns an error, stop and ask yourself whether there's any way you can redfined the function to eliminate the error condition." This is the book that convinced me to single-step all my code. The heuristics on proactive bug prevention, which are summarized in the appendix by the way, will save your team time and let you move on to adding features rather than fighting fires.

This is one of the best books on programming ever written. Maguire concentrates on how to eradicate bugs early in the cycle. At first what he says seems so simple. But these ideas are so powerful, and so well presented, that I'd give a copy to every programmer I know if I could afford to.Don't worry that his examples are in C. The ideas transcend the source language. If half of the programmers followed half of his suggestions half of the time, the software industry would undergo a revolution in quality. There is no silver bullet, but these suggestions are so practical. It's just a matter of adopting a few good habbits.This book will be a classic. Scratch that. It *is* a classic.If you're a programmer, it belongs on your shelf beside _Programming Pearls_, _Code Complete_, and Knuth.

This book is a must have for anyone writing code in C or C++. It explains how to properly use debug code such as asserts and other techniques to write more reliable code. I learned several techniques that I now use every day without ever thinking about it. I shudder when I look at old code I wrote before reading this book. Writing Solid Code is literally required reading in many software engineering departments. Steve also relates several stories about bugs in Excel or other Microsoft products that were caught using these techniques or that would have been caught if the techniques were used. Any C/C++ programmer, no matter how much or how little experience, could benefit from reading this book.

The presentation of the content - as noted by other reviews - may not be 5 star, but the content definitely makes up for any failings of the book. The book consolidates practices and information that every programmer should know. Its one of the few books I'd recommend to any programmer.

As a software developer with 18 years of experience, I didn't expect to get much out of this book at all. Silly me. It changed the way I write code. It's filled with many powerful techniques for writing code that will automatically catch bugs. It's very clearly written, has lots of useful examples, and is easy to follow. Beginners may have trouble, if they're not familiar with the sorts of problems that often show up in large software projects. More experienced developers will find it very useful.