Whether you’re working on an old codebase or a three-month old project, you most likely found yourself in a situation where you found the codebase confusing and hard to follow. You probably found code smells, duplications and massive classes. You knew you had to refactor it. There’s one book that I read ages ago by Martin Fowler called Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code that can help you do just that.
This book became a textbook for so many developers around the world. And it is a great tool that will teach you how to refactor any codebase, large or small. It starts with an intro to refactoring and some refactoring principles. Kent Beck and Martin Fowler will then teach you how to detect bad smells in the code and decide if you need to refactor it or not. The majority of the book will cover some specific refactoring techniques with loads of examples. True, the examples are in Java, but they can be easily converted to ObjC or Swift. You’ll end up with a whole catalog of refactoring methods and principles that you can apply in your projects right away.
All in all, this is a great book to have on your bookshelf and it’s definitely worth a read. I can honestly say that I’ve read this book years ago and I’m using the techniques I’ve learned from it every single day. It will be an invaluable tool in your toolbox. And, at the end of the day, it will make your app and codebase look better and more maintainable.
I hope this gives you an idea for your next read and as usual…
Have a nice day 🙂
~D;