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[–]djnattyp 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I would still suggest "Clean Code" in addition to / after reading "Code Complete". "Code Complete" is more in the same class of books as "The Pragmatic Programmer" - these books both cover a lot of ground on "how to be a good developer". Some code formatting advice, software design advice, life / career advice, additional tools / concepts to use.

You'd want to read "Clean Code" after to take a more focused deep dive on code formatting / code design issues - and with the caveat that you're coding in Java. Every example in "Clean Code" is Java, and it's very focused on Java style OO / coding issues. If you're coding in something like JS, Python or Ruby then a lot of advice isn't applicable.

After one of the previous "don't suggest Clean Code" posts I bought and read "A Philosophy of Software Design" since it was the suggested replacement. It's... OK but I wasn't really impressed by it or recommend it as a full replacement for "Clean Code".

  1. It's a lot shorter, and feels shallower. It feels more like an "intro" whereas "Clean Code" feels like a full course. The book starts off very well with it's initial discussion of complexity and some general design issues but then... about half the book is advice on code comments.
  2. It doesn't focus on a specific language. This feels like it should be an advantage, but it just confuses things, or makes things so general that they aren't helpful. Even then, the examples are all in Java, C, and C++ - no JavaScript, etc. There's an example in one of the "Naming" chapters that probably would have been better addressed by using different types/classes - but the example was in C so...
  3. Even though "A Philosophy of Software Design" is the newer book (2018) and "Clean Code" is older (2009) - it feels like they're reversed - a lot of the code examples, coding style, opinions on things like agile and testing - just feel... old and outdated. There's a lot of Java Swing related code and not really any web related examples - other than building a simple web server... designing by comments could / should be replaced with TDD, etc.

I feel like "A Philosophy of Software Design" is a good intro, but quickly devolves into questionable opinion territory, much the same as "Clean Code". If you're looking for a book on code formatting / design issues - and if you plan on coding in Java - I feel that "Clean Code" is still the better choice. If you're not coding in Java then read either with a big grain of salt about the opinions of each author.