Kent Beck is always worth listening to, and I have been waiting for the advice in this book for several decades now. This book helps to move the focus in software away from the tools and technology, and firmly onto what really matters, design! Design is about the shapes we paint with our code, and Kent helps us to paint better shapes. This is an important book on an important topic.
Dave Farley, Founder and Director of Continuous Delivery Ltd.
With code bases that are hard to understand, it can be difficult for a developer to know where to start. This book gives practical tips for a developer at any level to help improve the code they work with.
Sam Newman, independent consultant, technologist, and author of Building Microservices and Monolith to Microservices
Kent Beck shares dozens of easy-to-follow ideas on how to turn complicated code into a simpler form. The ideas are simple, and yet, as you read them, you will wonder why you haven’t thought about many of these before. Recommended for anyone who cares about clean and readable code.
Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic Engineer
For decades, refactoring books have focused on top-down, object-oriented software design theories. Tidy First? breaks the mold by providing a realistic approach to incrementally improving real production code.
Maude Lemaire, author of Refactoring at Scale
Let’s be honest: 99% of a software engineer’s job involves working on brownfield projects. This can be difficult, especially if the code wasn’t written with readability in mind. In this book, Kent Beck turns things around by prioritizing human relationships through code. He succinctly teaches how to improve software design with small, gradual changes, thereby making the code clearer for both you and your colleagues.
Vlad Khononov, author of Learning Domain-Driven Design