Book Review: Implementation Patterns (Kent Beck, 2007)

02 Jan 2019

This is a book I'd recommend to everybody writing business software (and software in general) since it provides clear motivation for a lot of the coding practices we software developers have adopted but can't quite trace back to first principles. The book has some downsides - mostly being too vague at some points and feeling a bit unfinished - but that's something I can forgive.

The main idea of the book can is that the cost of software maintenance is much greater than the cost of initial software development and that means that we should adopt practices that reduce the maintenance cost. This comes as somewhat obvious to me but keeping it in my head while considering alternative approaches helps me considerably.

The book is futher structured in three values: Communication, Simplicity and Flexibility, several so called principles and then the meat of the book - a long list of varying topics (which are confusingly called patterns - while they are super interesting I'd not call them patterns)

In the end I think most of it boils down to the idea of writing code that communicates well: considering how it will be read and changed by others since that's what's going to be happenning to it the most. The values of Simplicity and Flexibility just further support that goal.

The book is quite short which I generally view as a plus even though in this case it makes it sound hand-wavy at points.

All of the examples are in Java but with very few exceptions the advice applies to any object oriented language and even further.