Tidy First?

Foreword

This slim volume, the first of a series, is for professional programmers–that breed of software developers with a deep and geeky interest in their craft and in improving their work in small ways with big payoffs. The author, Kent Beck, is just such a dedicated professional, ever attentive to detail and ever in tune with the larger issues and the bigger picture.

Practicing software developers often pay scant attention to theory, but Kent knows what he is talking about when he mixes practice and theory into a guide to tidy code that is both readable and practical.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is. Various versions of this pithy pronouncement have been widely and incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein and Yogi Berra, among others. Only a nerdy wordsmith (guilty as charged!) would care that the correct attribution is to Benjamin Brewster, a student at Yale writing in an 1882 edition of the Yale Literary Magazine. Thanks to the dedicated word geeks at QuoteInvestigator.com, I can offer this bit of geeky detail confident of the audience here: this is a profession that hinges on getting the details right.

In bringing theory and practice together, Kent starts at the bottom, with tiny snippets of code and meticulous attention to small details, then works his way up to the larger view that explains the process of creating cleaner code that is more robust in the face of inevitable changes and corrections. In assembling ...