"This is a warm and reassuring book that will equip you to read, understand, and update legacy code in any language." --Kate Gregory "It is easy to forget that outside the world of software development, the word legacy has another meaning. A positive meaning, a gift of wealth from the past to the present for the future. This book will help you reclaim the word." --Kevlin Henney If you're like most software developers, you have to deal with legacy code. But working with legacy code is challenging! This book will teach you how to be happy, efficient and successful when working with legacy code. Here are the skills that The Legacy Code Programmer's Toolbox will teach you: - how to deal with legacy code efficiently and with a positive approach, - 10 techniques how to understand legacy code, - 5 ways to reduce the size of long functions, - a technique to turn legacy code to your advantage to improve your programming skills, - how to be in a motivated mindset, - the power of knowledge of your codebase, how to acquire it and make every person in your team acquire it too, - how to find the source of a bug quickly in a large and unfamiliar codebase, - where to focus your refactoring efforts so that they make your life easier, - and many more things to be efficient and happy when working with legacy code!

Get more out of your legacy systems: more performance, functionality, reliability, and manageability Is your code easy to change? Can you get nearly instantaneous feedback when you do change it? Do you understand it? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you have legacy code, and it is draining time and money away from your development efforts. In this book, Michael Feathers offers start-to-finish strategies for working more effectively with large, untested legacy code bases. This book draws on material Michael created for his renowned Object Mentor seminars: techniques Michael has used in mentoring to help hundreds of developers, technical managers, and testers bring their legacy systems under control. The topics covered include Understanding the mechanics of software change: adding features, fixing bugs, improving design, optimizing performance Getting legacy code into a test harness Writing tests that protect you against introducing new problems Techniques that can be used with any language or platform—with examples in Java, C++, C, and C# Accurately identifying where code changes need to be made Coping with legacy systems that aren't object-oriented Handling applications that don't seem to have any structure This book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking techniques that help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes.

Master the Linux Tools That Will Make You a More Productive, Effective Programmer The Linux Programmer's Toolbox helps you tap into the vast collection of open source tools available for GNU/Linux. Author John Fusco systematically describes the most useful tools available on most GNU/Linux distributions using concise examples that you can easily modify to meet your needs. You'll start by learning the basics of downloading, building, and installing open source projects. You'll then learn how open source tools are distributed, and what to look for to avoid wasting time on projects that aren't ready for you. Next, you'll learn the ins and outs of building your own projects. Fusco also demonstrates what to look for in a text editor, and may even show you a few new tricks in your favorite text editor. You'll enhance your knowledge of the Linux kernel by learning how it interacts with your software. Fusco walks you through the fundamentals of the Linux kernel with simple, thought-provoking examples that illustrate the principles behind the operating system. Then he shows you how to put this knowledge to use with more advanced tools. He focuses on how to interpret output from tools like sar, vmstat, valgrind, strace, and apply it to your application; how to take advantage of various programming APIs to develop your own tools; and how to write code that monitors itself. Next, Fusco covers tools that help you enhance the performance of your software. He explains the principles behind today's multicore CPUs and demonstrates how to squeeze the most performance from these systems. Finally, you'll learn tools and techniques to debug your code under any circumstances. Coverage includes Maximizing productivity with editors, revision control tools, source code browsers, and "beautifiers" Interpreting the kernel: what your tools are telling you Understanding processes–and the tools available for managing them Tracing and resolving application bottlenecks with gprof and valgrind Streamlining and automating the documentation process Rapidly finding help, solutions, and workarounds when you need them Optimizing program code with sar, vmstat, iostat, and other tools Debugging IPC with shell commands: signals, pipes, sockets, files, and IPC objects Using printf, gdb, and other essential debugging tools Foreword Preface Acknowledgments About the Author Chapter 1 Downloading and Installing Open Source Tools Chapter 2 Building from Source Chapter 3 Finding Help Chapter 4 Editing and Maintaining Source Files Chapter 5 What Every Developer Should Know about the Kernel Chapter 6 Understanding Processes Chapter 7 Communication between Processes Chapter 8 Debugging IPC with Shell Commands Chapter 9 Performance Tuning Chapter 10 Debugging Index

Are you working on a codebase where cost overruns, death marches, and heroic fights with legacy code monsters are the norm? Battle these adversaries with novel ways to identify and prioritize technical debt, based on behavioral data from how developers work with code. And that's just for starters. Because good code involves social design, as well as technical design, you can find surprising dependencies between people and code to resolve coordination bottlenecks among teams. Best of all, the techniques build on behavioral data that you already have: your version-control system. Join the fight for better code! Use statistics and data science to uncover both problematic code and the behavioral patterns of the developers who build your software. This combination gives you insights you can't get from the code alone. Use these insights to prioritize refactoring needs, measure their effect, find implicit dependencies between different modules, and automatically create knowledge maps of your system based on actual code contributions. In a radical, much-needed change from common practice, guide organizational decisions with objective data by measuring how well your development teams align with the software architecture. Discover a comprehensive set of practical analysis techniques based on version-control data, where each point is illustrated with a case study from a real-world codebase. Because the techniques are language neutral, you can apply them to your own code no matter what programming language you use. Guide organizational decisions with objective data by measuring how well your development teams align with the software architecture. Apply research findings from social psychology to software development, ensuring you get the tools you need to coach your organization towards better code. If you're an experienced programmer, software architect, or technical manager, you'll get a new perspective that will change how you work with code. What You Need: You don't have to install anything to follow along in the book. TThe case studies in the book use well-known open source projects hosted on GitHub. You'll use CodeScene, a free software analysis tool for open source projects, for the case studies. We also discuss alternative tooling options where they exist.

As iOS apps become increasingly complex and business-critical, iOS developers must ensure consistently superior code quality. This means adopting best practices for creating and testing iOS apps. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is one of the most powerful of these best practices. Test-Driven iOS Development is the first book 100% focused on helping you successfully implement TDD and unit testing in an iOS environment. Long-time iOS/Mac developer Graham Lee helps you rapidly integrate TDD into your existing processes using Apple’s Xcode 4 and the OCUnit unit testing framework. He guides you through constructing an entire Objective-C iOS app in a test-driven manner, from initial specification to functional product. Lee also introduces powerful patterns for applying TDD in iOS development, and previews powerful automated testing capabilities that will soon arrive on the iOS platform. Coverage includes Understanding the purpose, benefits, and costs of unit testing in iOS environments Mastering the principles of TDD, and applying them in areas from app design to refactoring Writing usable, readable, and repeatable iOS unit tests Using OCUnit to set up your Xcode project for TDD Using domain analysis to identify the classes and interactions your app needs, and designing it accordingly Considering third-party tools for iOS unit testing Building networking code in a test-driven manner Automating testing of view controller code that interacts with users Designing to interfaces, not implementations Testing concurrent code that typically runs in the background Applying TDD to existing apps Preparing for Behavior Driven Development (BDD) The only iOS-specific guide to TDD and unit testing, Test-Driven iOS Development covers both essential concepts and practical implementation.

The purpose of this research is to investigate how programmers approach trying to understand legacy code in order to maintain and improve it. Because each programmer has a personal approach to this task, this research was performed using a qualitative approach using grounded theory. Data was gathered through interviews of programmers and data analysis was done on the interview transcripts using open, axial, and selective coding techniques. Twenty programmers were interviewed from February 2006 to September 2006. The interviews were terminated when conceptual saturation was reached. The transcripts of the interviews were transcribed and subjected to conceptual and linguistic analysis from February 2006 to October 2006.