Refactoring – Improving the Design of Existing Code

Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, Don Roberts9780201485677, 0201485672

As the application of object technology – particularly the Java programming language – has become commonplace, a new problem has emerged to confront the software development community. Significant numbers of poorly designed programs have been created by less-experienced developers, resulting in applications that are inefficient and hard to maintain and extend. Increasingly, software system professionals are discovering just how difficult it is to work with these inherited, “non-optimal” applications. For several years, expert-level object programmers have employed a growing collection of techniques to improve the structural integrity and performance of such existing software programs. Referred to as “refactoring,” these practices have remained in the domain of experts because no attempt has been made to transcribe the lore into a form that all developers could use. . .until now. In Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, renowned object technology mentor Martin Fowler breaks new ground, demystifying these master practices and demonstrating how software practitioners can realize the significant benefits of this new process. With proper training a skilled system designer can take a bad design and rework it into well-designed, robust code. In this book, Martin Fowler shows you where opportunities for refactoring typically can be found, and how to go about reworking a bad design into a good one. Each refactoring step is simple – seemingly too simple to be worth doing. Refactoring may involve moving a field from one class to another, or pulling some code out of a method to turn it into its own method, or even pushing some code up or down a hierarchy. While these individual steps may seem elementary, the cumulative effect of such small changes can radically improve the design. Refactoring is a proven way to prevent software decay. In addition to discussing the various techniques of refactoring, the author provides a detailed catalog of more than seventy proven refactorings with helpful pointers that teach you when to apply them; step-by-step instructions for applying each refactoring; and an example illustrating how the refactoring works. The illustrative examples are written in Java, but the ideas are applicable to any object-oriented programming language.

---

Table of contents :
Content……Page 3
Foreword……Page 6
Preface……Page 8
Chapter 1. Refactoring, a First Example……Page 13
Chapter 2. Principles in Refactoring……Page 46
Chapter 3. Bad Smells in Code……Page 63
Chapter 4. Building Tests……Page 73
Chapter 5. Toward a Catalog of Refactorings……Page 85
Chapter 6. Composing Methods……Page 89
Chapter 7. Moving Features Between Objects……Page 115
Chapter 8. Organizing Data……Page 138
Chapter 9. Simplifying Conditional Expressions……Page 192
Chapter 10. Making Methods Calls Simpler……Page 220
Chapter 11. Dealing with Generalization……Page 259
Chapter 12. Big Refactorings……Page 293
Chapter 13. Refactoring, Reuse, and Reality……Page 311
Chapter 14. Refactoring Tools……Page 328
Chapter 15. Putting It All Together……Page 333
Bibliography. References……Page 336