I’ve spent a year reading Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. That’s not to say I’ve been reading it once a week or had so little time I only managed to read a single book. Instead, I’ve been slowly making my way through it – sometimes only reading a single page at a time. It has made me a better coder and I’m certain I’ll be reading it again.
The premise is: bad code can operate, but only clean code will work long-term. As code develops and matures, effort must be made to clean and improve it. If your code starts out ugly (or becomes ugly over time), things will inevitably fall apart. Bad code requires too much effort and too many resources to maintain. Businesses and organizations can be weighed down or destroyed by bad code.