Code That Fits in Your Head

How to reduce code complexity and develop software more sustainably

Code That Fits in Your Head offers indispensable, practical advice for writing code at a sustainable pace and controlling the complexity that causes projects to spin out of control.

Reflecting decades of experience helping software teams succeed, Mark Seemann guides you from zero (no code) to deployed features and shows how to maintain a good cruising speed as you add functionality, address cross-cutting concerns, troubleshoot, and optimise. You'll find valuable ideas, practices, and processes for key issues ranging from checklists to teamwork, encapsulation to decomposition, API design to unit testing.

Seemann illuminates his insights with code examples drawn from a complete sample project. Written in C#, they're designed to be clear and useful to anyone who uses any object-oriented language including Java , C++, and Python.

• Choose mindsets and processes that work, and escape bad metaphors that don't
• Use checklists to liberate yourself, improving outcomes with the skills you already have
• Get past 'analysis paralysis' by creating and deploying a vertical slice of your application
• Counteract forces that lead to code rot and unnecessary complexity
• Master better techniques for changing code behaviour
• Discover ways to solve code problems more quickly and effectively
• Think more productively about performance and security

If you've ever suffered through bad projects or had to cope with unmaintainable legacy code, this guide will help you make things better next time and every time.