ybooks

Books

Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Michael Feathers · 2004

Recommended by 2 people on the record.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

Adam Tornhill recommends it
First, Refactoring, Domain-Driven Design, and the Pragmatic Programmer are all classics for a reason. Amazing books, and mandatory reads. Working Effectively with Legacy Code deserves all its praise, and of course everyone (yes, really) should check out the Mythical Man-Month.

on adamtornhill.substack.com · 11 Aug 2026

Gergely Orosz loved it
Legacy code has no test and is not written to be testable. Touching it this sphaghetti code somewhere breaks the system. And to refactor safely, we'd need to have tests first... but where to start? This book gives practical suggestions

on blog.pragmaticengineer.com · 16 Dec 2024

This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.