Refactoring - Improving the design of existing code
- Author
- Martin Fowler
- Published
- ,
A book introducing the concept of refactoring.
Differences between the first and revised editions
The examples used Java in the first edition, but changed to JavaScript in the revised edition.
I chose JavaScript to illustrate these refactorings, as I felt that this language would be readable by the most amount of people. … Although I use JavaScript for my examples, that doesn’t mean the techniques in this book are confined to JavaScript. —Preface
Several final chapters disappeared from the revised edition. The reason:
I dropped the later chapters, which explored some more tangential issues. I think they worked in the first edition, but these days I think it’s better to publish essays like this on my website. That’s the same reason why I also dropped the four “big refactorings” from the catalog. The big refactorings were always a bit different to the majority of the refactorings, and I do feel these examples work better through essays on my website.1