In short, this is in my top five programming books I've ever read. Please do not hesitate, do everyone that works with your code (especially yourself) a favor and read it.
I believe that in 20 years, this will be considered one of the definitive works on Object-Oriented Programming. The author provides a smooth on-ramp from basic OO programming principles, and builds on it until you're able to understand the kinds of lessons that normally only come from decades of day-in, day-out experience working in OO code.
What's unusual about this book?
- It reads your mind.
The author takes enormous care to empathize with the reader. Many times, you'll find yourself reading and thinking something, only to read "you're probably thinking at this point..." with your exact thought or concern.
- The author is okay with sounding like a human being.
The author's colloquial style peeks through over and over again. I kept getting caught off guard by delightful little turns of phrase that one does not see often in programming books.
- The lessons are grounded in reality.
Since Ms. Metz keeps the examples surprisingly close to production code (though a somewhat simplified version), you don't have to reach very far to figure out how you'd apply these lessons. Examples aren't contrived to prove a point, they are real-life situations that demand a solution, which always seems to be presented at just the right time. While reading, you'll find yourself exclaiming when she pinpoints the exact source of pain that you run into frequently.
- Sections end, rather than begin, with a principle.
This is the first book about Object-Oriented design I've read that doesn't clobber you over the head with jargon or come in with a top-down approach. Most technical books start with an assertion, pattern, or hypothesis, then spend the rest of the book explaining and trying to convince you. Ms. Metz takes the longer, more difficult approach of organically working through a typical Object-Oriented application, growing it, feeling pain, and addressing that pain. Along the way, she points out where these pain points are addressed, and only then does she explain that there is a name for the solution,
- It is immediately beneficial.
For my part, I couldn't wait to go back and apply all the lessons I learned to code that I'd written that I wasn't happy with and couldn't figure out why. I've used the lessons from this book to help guide my intuition about the kind of code that lends itself to long-term maintainability.
- It contains no religious zealotry.
There's no preachiness: it's all about strategies, tactics, and tradeoffs a software developer employs to reach a desired goal. It also has the most concise and articulate overview of testing styles I've ever seen. Many programming books lose the forest for the trees, focusing on a pattern, principle, tool, or technique, touting it as *the* solution to all your programming problems. Ms. Metz never falls into that trap, and keeps the focus on writing code that can meet the changing needs of users for years to come.
- It is timeless.
Rather than a trendy new topic, this book could find itself applicable 25 years ago or 25 years from now. I believe it'll be regarded as a landmark volume on the topic of OO design, along with books like Kent Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. It's obvious that lots of care, attention, and refinement went into this book, and the reader benefits greatly. I'm grateful to Sandy for writing this book, I plan to re-read it at least once a year to keep my OO skills from falling into atrophy.
I wish I could provide some negative feedback to balance the review, but I simply don't have any. If you're a relatively new, intermediate, or even somewhat advanced OO developer in any langauge, purchasing this book is the best way I know to level up your Object-Oriented design skills.
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