By Michael Feathers
456 pages
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0131177052

This was one of those famous, timeless books (like Code Complete) that I had heard many people talk about, and I finally read it. To be honest it was in my Amazon "Wish List" for several months before I ordered it, but it lived up to the hype.

Remember when you first started writing software? Like most people, for me it was a very exciting time and I truly enjoyed learning and trying to push the boundaries of programming. It is a very primal passion that engulfed me, and it is the reason many of us got into this industry. Where did that go? Do you still feel that today? If so, you are one of the lucky ones. In this book, Michael explains how large code bases (that don’t have tests around them) can sometimes suck that enjoyment out of our day-to-day tasks, because we slowly develop a fear making changes to this monolithic application because we are worried about what we might break or what expected side-effects fixing a bug or adding a new feature might have. Although we might not typically acknowledge this fear, it is present whether we admit it or not.

Sometimes we romanticize the idea of working on “Greenfield” projects, because if we were just able to start from scratch … this would be much easier and a lot more fun. I have slowly become convinced that isn’t the case. There is tedious and unexpected ripples in new projects just like existing projects. This book is dedicated to given practical techniques to remove that fear, and get to a place where you can actually enjoy working in your code base. It is possible, and Michael has the experience and expertise to help you bring your legacy systems under control.

I often am weary that books like this that are on “hot” topics like test-driven-development are fluff, and aren’t very relevant to my day-to-day real-world code. Not true … at least not on this book. I would highly recommend this to book to anyone. It is worth the money, time, and effort to read it cover-to-cover. This is probably in my top 5 for technology books in terms of real-world value they provide.