Enjoying Beck’s Tidy First?, though so far mostly a lot of things I already agree with and try to do.

But this is one of my favorite techniques, and something I don’t see used that often:

Sometimes you read code that’s been split into many tiny pieces, but in a way that hinders you from understanding it. Inline as much of the code as you need until it’s all in one big pile. Tidy from there.

This book reminds me a lot of his earlier book Smalltalk: Best Practice Patterns (which was very good even for non-Smalltalk languages), but Tidy First is actually meant to be more general and so far has so many techniques that I find invaluable. Probably going to go next to 99 Bottles of OOP for books I recommend for programmers who want to get better at the craft.

Also, it’s so nice that SPL has free access to the O’Reilly library. (Previously Safari, but I forget what it’s called now.)

@alpha HA. I do almost exactly this but by way of VIM splits. Just the mental model of seeing it all together.

@alpha Is the book proper out now? I’m following along on the substack and hard agree with all your comments. What I find most interesting is his commentary on “value” and the economics of it all.

@ratkins It’s available in the O’Reilly Complete Public Library (nee Safari Books Online), which is where I’m reading it.