Code That Fits in Your Head: Heuristics for Software Engineering

How to Reduce Code Complexity and Develop Software More Sustainably

"Mark Seemann is well known for explaining complex concepts clearly and thoroughly. In this book he condenses his wide-ranging software development experience into a set of practical, pragmatic techniques for writing sustainable and human-friendly code. This book will be a must-read for every programmer."
-- Scott Wlaschin, author of Domain Modeling Made Functional

Code That Fits in Your Head offers indispensable, practical advice for writing code at a sustainable pace and controlling the complexity that causes projects to spin out of control.

Reflecting decades of experience helping software teams succeed, Mark Seemann guides you from zero (no code) to deployed features and shows how to maintain a good cruising speed as you add functionality, address cross-cutting concerns, troubleshoot, and optimize. You'll find valuable ideas, practices, and processes for key issues ranging from checklists to teamwork, encapsulation to decomposition, API design to unit testing.

Seemann illuminates his insights with code examples drawn from a complete sample project. Written in C#, they're designed to be clear and useful to anyone who uses any object-oriented language including Java , C++, and Python. To facilitate deeper exploration, all code and extensive commit messages are available for download.

• Choose mindsets and processes that work, and escape bad metaphors that don't
• Use checklists to liberate yourself, improving outcomes with the skills you already have
• Get past “analysis paralysis” by creating and deploying a vertical slice of your application
• Counteract forces that lead to code rot and unnecessary complexity
• Master better techniques for changing code behavior
• Discover ways to solve code problems more quickly and effectively
• Think more productively about performance and security

If you've ever suffered through bad projects or had to cope with unmaintainable legacy code, this guide will help you make things better next time and every time.

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Mark Seemann, a former economist, found a second career as a programmer and has worked as a web and enterprise developer since the late 1990s. He is a Certified Rockstar Developer and has written a Jolt Award-winning book about Dependency Injection, given more than a hundred international conference talks, and authored video courses for both Pluralsight and Clean Coders. Mark has regularly published his blog ( blog.ploeh.dk) since 2006.