Code can be improved and changed almost endlessly. In the book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, Martin Fowler describes ways you can "refactor" code so that it is clearer and new features may be added easier.
This page reviews the book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler.
What is the point of refactoring? Often, when coding a project, the initial design does not allow new features to be added easily. If you need to add a new feature, you must change a lot of existing code. This opens up your project to new bugs in old code! Refactoring is a way of revising code so that this won't happen.
Yes. I found the book Refactoring by Martin Fowler to be very interesting and it helped me understand object-oriented program design better. Most of the book contains very concrete examples of ways you can refactor code to make it easier to add new features to or change existing capabilities.
For example, one of my favorite specific refactorings is the Introduce Null Object technique found on page 260. With languages such as Java and C#, objects often have the value of 'null'. If you try to call a method on a null object, the program will crash! Therefore, programs sometimes repeatedly check for null, making the logic more complex.
With null objects, you can provide an actual implementation for 'null', and avoid ever checking against the null literal. Often you can add an IsNull() method in case you need to detect whether the null object is being used. One benefit of this is that many exceptions will disappear. Dot Net Perls approves of disappearing crashes.
Most of the time, programmers focus on one platform or language. For example, I am more comfortable with the C# language than I am with Java or C++. However, the Java code samples in Refactoring are so clear and well-described that this is not an obstacle. You should have some understanding of how object-oriented languages are used first, though.
I recommend Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler for all programmers working in object-oriented languages including the C# language. I have not found it a book I need to frequently reference, but it was educational to read and has some interesting and even entertaining examples in it.
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