Software Design X-Rays

How Should You Read This Book?

The book progresses from smaller systems to large-scale codebases with millions of lines of code and thousands of developers. The early chapters lay the foundation for the more complex analyses by introducing fundamental concepts like hotspots and dependency analyses based on time and evolution of code. This means you’ll want to read the first three chapters to build a solid toolset for tackling the more advanced material in Part II.

The last two chapters of Part I, Chapter 4, ​Pay Off Your Technical Debt​, and Chapter 5, ​The Principles of Code Age​, travel deeper into real code and are the most technical ones in the book. Feel free to skip them if you’re more interested in maintaining a high-level strategic view ...