D. Seholm said
As stated in the previous review this "pamphlet sized" book is invaluable to programs working in any sized group. Not only do you need programming style rules, these are pre-defined for you, so there is no time wasted with your team trying to decide on one. I am a project manager over a several groups of computer and software engineers, and after hearing more style arguments than I care to remember this book is now law at our company, it is also followed by our c/c++ programmers in a fashion of sorts... style is important, it does need guidelines, and if you dont follow them you may not have a job for very long... its common since!!!!
a_bucket_of_shoes said
Other reviews here that attack this book for not being a good design guide are missing the point. This book is a set of practices to make your code easier to read and work better in groups. Each chapter is about some kind of convention (formatting conventions, documentation conventions, etc.). You're not going to learn to program with this guide; you're going to learn to make your programs more usable in a group environment. Yes, it is a pamphlet-sized book: that's the point.
Jenson J. Crawford said
Clear, consise and short enough that developers will actually take the time to read, and filled with enough common sense that very few disagreements come from the developers about this.
We use this book as the basis for our corporate coding standards for our on-shore, off-shore and near-shore. The standards page on our wiki is very short and contains only the few places where we've chosen to deviate from the standards in the book.
If you've ever tried to have a team develop standards from scratch, you know what a painful process that could be. This book got the whole team (in multiple countries) on the same page very quickly and let us focus our time on getting down to the business of writing software.
Anton Kommar said
Several years have passed since this book was first published. Many things have changed in the Java world since then.
However, it looks like development at a corporate level of a software product without adherence to some sort of development and code standards is disappearing. This book contains a very good set of rules and code standards one can start with.
Not that it is important to follow exactly some specific already existing guideline but it is rather vital to have one and keep going with this set of standards. The book suggests a wide range of various well described code standards so that a Development team might build their own set of rules using the book as an example.
I would like to recommend any Development team to have this small but helpful book in their library.
Won Lee said
I'm very disappointed at the amount content in this Book. Sun posted a Java style guide that was essentially the equivalent, but free. Equivalent in terms of topics covered while there were some noticable difference such as variable naming.
One of the redeming qualities of the book though is that it can serve as a coding standard thus saving one from tidious chore of deciding on your own standards. In the end does it really make that much of a difference as long as everyone on your team is following the same standard?
Best part of the book is the title.
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