What Background Do You Need?


It would be helpful to have the book, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code , by Martin Fowler et al. (or at least to have access to the www.refactoring.com Web site) for its catalog of refactorings. (You can read my book and Refactoring at the same time.) Martin and his colleagues have worked out step-by-step instructions for many refactorings, and I will not repeat those in this book. Furthermore, they've provided a fully worked-out example, along with a lot of good discussion and background material. Someone determined to get through this book without that one could probably do it, but I wouldn't recommend it.

The examples in this book are written in Java. This is not because it's the easiest language to refactor, but because it's popular, and the best Java development environments provide automated refactoring support. A C# or C++ programmer has enough reading knowledge of Java to make sense of most of the questions. However, in later parts of the book, you will modify, test, and run larger programs, and this could be problematic for programmers using languages other than Java.

The book Design Patterns , by Gamma et al., describes patterns as "targets for refactoring." It would be helpful to have some familiarity with the ideas in that book because I freely refer to the patterns it mentions. If you're not yet familiar with Design Patterns, let me recommend Steve Metsker's book, Design Patterns Java Workbook , as well.



Refactoring Workbook
Refactoring Workbook
ISBN: 0321109295
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 146

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