“Clean Code”: Despite being out of town for the weekend, I snuck away for a few moments to begin planning my part of the Peer Pressure Learning experiment. Below are my initial thoughts on spending 30 consecutive days studying and practicing Clean Code.

I was pleased to see that the text includes a Chapter (17) with just over 60 code smells. I’ll look to use those as part of the daily routine, attempting to write code that implements two each day.

When it comes to reading, I’m thinking that I’ll start by trying to do a certain number of pages each day. While that may break the book up into somewhat unnatural chunks, I figure that I can massage the sections each day to a more sensible length. I’ll post my reading plan as I go and perhaps organize it when I’m done.

The code-focused text begins with Chapter 2 (location 916 in the Kindle edition) and continues to Chapter 16 (ending at 7,091). Chapter 13 covers concurrency, which isn’t immediately relavant, so I’m going to skip it. So that leaves about 6,000 whatever-the-kindle-calls-them, or 200 per day. Once I’m in front of my print copy…I’ll get a sense of how many pages that is.

If you’re new to Clean Code, I’d recommend that you read through the introductory material, especially Chapter 1. Having written a book once, I can attest that the authors typically don’t put that stuff in there for nothing. I especially enjoyed the Introduction and its challenge towards hard work and sweat!