The Art of Readable Code

Part I. Surface-Level Improvements

We begin our tour of readability with what we consider “surface-level” improvements: picking good names, writing good comments, and formatting your code neatly. These types of changes are easy to apply. You can make them “in place,” without having to refactor your code or change how the program runs. You can also make them incrementally, without a huge time investment.

These topics are very important because they affect every line of code in your codebase. Although each change may seem small, in aggregate they can make a huge improvement to a codebase. If your code has great names, well-written comments, and clean use of whitespace, your code will be much easier to read.

Of course, there’s a lot more beneath the surface level when it comes to readability (and we’ll cover that in later parts of the book). But the material in this part is so widely applicable, for so little effort, that it’s worth covering first.