Adrian's Reviews > Working Effectively with Legacy Code

If i had this book wheh i was first starting out my career, i would've considered it a must read.
Its like going back in time a bit, seeing first hand how the author disembowels legacy monster code - providing both C++ /Java code snippets examples (the monster+ the solution).
I really enjoyed the chapters on slaying sticky singletons, blocking I/O static calls to databases and untested concrete hierarchies of classes.

The lesson of this book for me was: as soon as you get into a brown project, start writing tests, start putting your classes into test harnesses and see how deep you have to dive into the guts of the underlying system.

Once you do that you'll get a fairly good idea of the difficulty of your task

On the negatives:
I found the examples in this book too focused on C++ (i got an iffy feeling when a book is too focused on a single programming languge).

I totally recommend this book for people that have to deal with legacy code or are not yet accustomed with the "modern approaches" (DRY, SOLID - which aren't that modern anymore anyway) or junior just starting out.