Book

A Philosophy of Software Design

John Ousterhout

A short argument about deep modules and shallow interfaces that disagrees, usefully, with a lot of received advice about small functions. Worth reading for the disagreement alone.

• Software engineering

1 idea from this book

• FrameworkSoftware engineering

  Complexity is what you must hold in your head to make a safe change

  Judge a design by how much a reader must understand to change it safely, and prefer deep modules behind small interfaces.

  Code review, design discussions, and software engineering interviews that ask what good code is.