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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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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Making Your App Infintely More Testable

You’re writing a PHP application. You know you need to write tests. Tests aren’t something that comes naturally to you yet; you’re still working on learning the ins and outs of PHPUnit (the default standard framework). But you know that right now, your app isn’t testable. What can you do to make it testable?

The single most important thing you can do to make your app testable

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Abstraction In The Real World

Abstraction is one of the subjects in software development that’s really difficult to fully grasp without practice. It’s easy to read about it, talk about it, and profess doing it. To actually do it is another thing entirely: it requires practice, and patience, and experimentation.

I decided the best way to show abstraction in action is by showing the commits I made as I worked to abstract a model that contained the validation and database logic inside the same class. You can see my progress, as well as my notes about what I’m doing as I go along below.

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