Refactoring ─ Improving the Design of Existing Code

A guide to refactoring, the process of changing a software system so that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure, for professional programmers. Early chapters cover general principles, rationales, examples, and testing. The heart of the book is a catalog of refactorings, organized in chapters on composing methods, moving features between objects, organizing data, simplifying conditional expressions, and dealing with generalizations. Later chapters describe issues in adopting refactoring in commercial development, automated tools, and the future of refactoring. Java is used for all examples. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Martin Fowler is the Chief Scientist of ThoughtWorks, an enterprise-application development and delivery company. He's been applying object-oriented techniques to enterprise software development for over a decade. He is notorious for his work on patterns, the UML, refactoring, and agile methods. Martin lives in Melrose, Massachusetts, with his wife, Cindy, and a very strange cat. His homepage is http://martinfowler.com.

Kent Beck consistently challenges software engineering dogma, promoting ideas like patterns, test-driven development, and Extreme Programming. Currently affiliated with Three Rivers Institute and Agitar Software, he is the author of many Addison-Wesley titles.

John Brant and Don Roberts are the authors of the Refactoring Browser for Smalltalk, which is found at http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/~brant/RefactoringBrowser/. They are also consultants who have studied both the practical and theoretical aspects of refactoring for six years.

William Opdyke's doctoral research on refactoring object-oriented frameworks at the University of Illinois led to the first major publication on this topic. He is currently a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Lucent Technologies/Bell Laboratories.

John Brant and Don Roberts are the authors of the Refactoring Browser for Smalltalk, which is found at http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/~brant/RefactoringBrowser/. They are also consultants who have studied both the practical and theoretical aspects of refactoring for six years.