After spending several hours listening to his talks, it occured to me that this information is needed by all developers and perhaps may be beyond the immediate consideration of beginners. In order to do my part to share the message of a man named Robert C Martin I will be writing a summaries of his talks as I watch them.
The Man
Robert C Martin is an American software engineer who writes wonderful books about writing code as well as teaching and talking on the material of his books. His website contains a great deal of information, and you have likely heard about these books as many are considered required reading for career developers.
- Designing Object-Oriented C++ Applications Using the Booch Method 1995
- Agile Software Development 2002
- Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship 2009
- The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct For Professional Programmers 2011
- Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design 2017
- Clean Agile: Back to Basics 2019
Uncle Bob is credited with cretion of the SOLID principles, was a founder of the Agile Manifesto. He served as editor-in-chief of C++ Report magazine and served as the first charman of the Agile Alliance. His writing can be found at blog.cleancoder.com and you can find many of his talks on YouTube if you don't have the ability to attend one in person. He runs a consulting company as as a company that provides training videos.
In the coming weeks I will be writing beginner level summaries of his publicly available videos.
Happy Coding!
Top comments (5)
At the risk of seemingly like the wet rag, Robert Martin is also somewhat controversial, not only for some discriminatory attitudes, but also because, despite some of his ideas being good, he also cannot apparently tell the difference between his opinion and objective fact. I highly recommend you take anything he says with a very large grain of salt: even many of his ardent fans will admit that you have to sift through his work, which requires industry experience of your own. It is usually best to learn Agile and Clean Coding from other sources.
I understand that he has some pretty awful non-tech beliefs, but I haven't actually come across much of that. I've been developing for 6 years so I'm using a bit of salt here. My goal is to provide a series of summaries using one of his video series as a gateway to the topic for others (and to bolster my own understanding). I'd prefer to keep myself clear of his personal details. I have finished watching a 6 video series of his talks and this series of posts will be continued with my summary of those. I have the first one written and ready for publishing next week. I do hope that you will follow and be sure to check out that article. I'm newly learning clean code principles, and I'd really appreciate your feedback on my understanding.
I'd be happy to follow along, sure. We definitely need better summaries of Clean Coding than the ones Martin provides.
The one piece of advice I give on the topic is summarized like this: Clean Coding is not sacred scripture. Brain not included. As long as you bear that in mind, which it already looks like you do, you should be fine!
See also,
Clean, DRY, SOLID Spaghetti
Jason C. McDonald ・ Jul 24 '18 ・ 9 min read
Thanks for the information. I did, fortunately, see that in the last video of that series even he said that these are the ideals and they must be broken at least occasionally and that if you watch the videos that he puts on the cc website then you will see him demonstrating reasons and times for breaking the rules.
Ultimately my professional understanding is that nobody executes ideals. You just learn them so that you can figure out the very best ways that you can incorporate the pieces into your workflow and team standards.
I'd argue, that should be the first video in the series, not the last. There are too many people who cite his ideas as gospel. Glad he said it, though. It's better than nothing.