In Modern Software Engineering, continuous delivery pioneer David Farley helps software professionals think about their work more effectively, manage it more successfully, and genuinely improve the quality of their applications, their lives, and the lives of their colleagues.

Your brain responds in a predictable way when it encounters new or difficult tasks. This unique book teaches you concrete techniques rooted in cognitive science that will improve the way you learn and think about code. Learn how to optimize your brain’s natural cognitive processes to read code more easily, write code faster, and pick up new languages in much less time. This book will help you through the confusion you feel when faced with strange and complex code, and explain a codebase in ways that can make a new team member productive in days!

Practical techniques for writing code that is robust, reliable, and easy for team members to understand and adapt. In Good Code, Bad Code you’ll learn how to: Think about code like an effective software engineer, write functions that read like well-structured sentences, ensure code is reliable and bug free, effectively unit test code, identify code that can cause problems and improve it, write code that is reusable and adaptable to new requirements, improve your medium and long-term productivity, and save yourself and your team time.

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. 

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt wrote the first edition of this influential book in 1999 to help their clients create better software and rediscover the joy of coding. These lessons have helped a generation of programmers examine the very essence of software development. Now, 20 years later, this new edition re-examines what it means to be a modern programmer. Topics range from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse.