Code complexity and clean code

Many people wonder how they can improve the overall readability and cleanliness of their code. It seems impossible to understand exactly how to rewrite code in such a way that makes it clean, easy to understand and simple to work with. But clean code is about a few simple principles, one of which is reducing overall code complexity through a series of simple steps.

I’ve been working on a new book on clean code for the last few months. While I know that I’ll never answer all the considerations regarding clean code, I believe that I can make an impact in showing people how to measure their code’s cleanliness, and know exactly what they need to fix. One metric that I’ve been focusing on for the last few weeks is code complexity.

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Dealing with duplicated code

We’ve all seen it: we’re working along, and we come across code that just has a feel to it. It’s like déjà vu. You’ve seen this code before. You open another file – sure enough, there it is. The same code. Almost line for line.

In large code bases, it’s likely that there are dozens if not hundreds of similar behaviors that have to be completed more than once. And as code grows, is worked on by multiple developers, or just for the sake of speed, the same code gets copied or rewritten over and over again in different places.

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Compiling PHP 5.5 From Scratch

There’s always a lag behind new releases of PHP and releases of packages for operating systems such as Ubuntu. This lag time means that you could be kept from upgrading to the latest and greatest PHP for a year or more, unless you use an outside repository like Dotdeb. Of course, even when using one of these outside sources, you may still find a lag in the security and bugfixes made available to you.

Instead, I roll my own version of PHP. It’s simple and easy to do, and something that any developer can do. Here’s my instructions for doing so on a fresh Ubuntu installation.

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Making better object oriented design decisions

Last week I finished up the first section of The Object Oriented PHP Masterclass. The class was great, and I learned about as much from my students as they learned from me. One of the most common questions I got from my students was “how do I make decisions about how to design my object oriented applications?” This question got me thinking about object oriented design.

The syntax of object oriented PHP is relatively straightforward…

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Avoiding object oriented overkill

In the second live session of my object oriented design class, The Object Oriented PHP Masterclass, I show my students domain modeling, both with slides and with a live coding demonstration.

In my demonstration, I show them how I break the single model they’ve been using into three component parts: a value object, a data layer object (usually that talks to the database), and a gateway object that stands between the other two.

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Does your code keep you drowning in technical debt?

All of us would prefer to work on code that we love. And all of us are faced with code code that we feel…well, not so warm and fuzzy about. Its the nature of our business.

Legacy code is everywhere. From code that’s just been around a long time to code that was rushed to completion years and years ago and never fixed, we all have to deal with things that are imperfect and challenging to deal with.

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