Martin Fowler

I was lucky enough to work with Kent Beck on the C3 project that birthed Extreme Programming. There was a great deal I learned (and am still learning) from Kent, but one thing that really stood out was the approach he took to continually reworking the code base to keep it healthy, an approach that went under the then-unknown name of “Refactoring”. In my other consulting work I stressed how valuable a technique this is, but couldn’t point people to a book to learn about it, so I ended up writing it myself. It was published just before the 20th Century ended.

That’s nearly twenty years ago, and the technique is now more widely known, although often not executed as well as it should be. The book has also held up pretty well, and I think you can take this old book and still learn how to refactor pretty much

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