Five Lines of Code

In Five Lines of Code you will learn:

The signs of bad code
Improving code safely, even when you don’t understand it
Balancing optimization and code generality
Proper compiler practices
The Extract method, Introducing Strategy pattern, and many other refactoring patterns
Writing stable code that enables change-by-addition
Writing code that needs no comments
Real-world practices for great refactoring


Improving existing code—refactoring—is one of the most common tasks you’ll face as a programmer. Five Lines of Code teaches you clear and actionable refactoring rules that you can apply without relying on intuitive judgements such as “code smells.” Following the author’s expert perspective—that refactoring and code smells can be learned by following a concrete set of principles—you’ll learn when to refactor your code, what patterns to apply to what problem, and the code characteristics that indicate it’s time for a rework.