Landing on a Great Name: A short book on one of programming’s most challenging problems.

2023 | English | ISBN: NA | ASIN: NA | True (EPUB, PDF) | 67 pages | 1 MB

This is a different kind of programming booka book more about writing than about programming. A book more about qualitative feel than quantitative metrics. A book about the journey to landing on great names in programming.

This is a short book (~64 print pages) that’s more about writing than it is about programming.

We like to measure the quality of code by some series of metrics, how closely a codebase follows a set of indoctrinated principles, or other deterministic means. But good code writing is equally subjective. One fundamental challenge all programmers face is how to land on great namesnames for properties, methods, and classes. Through the author’s personal experience working on a real-world product, this book provides advice on one of programming’s most challenging problems: Naming.

Real code ages. Real code is pushed and pulled in conflicting directions over the course of a piece of software’s lifespan. To keep real code in good health is really hard. Naming (and, more importantly, renaming) things well is a powerful and simple antidote to decaying code.