#50 Tidy First? | Book Review
Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design by Kent Beck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Written by industry veteran Kent Beck, Tidy First? mostly repackages well-known refactoring ideas with a new label. The attempt to place “tidying” below “refactoring” didn’t convince me. It feels a bit misleading and slightly ironic because Fowler’s Refactoring is already extremely granular and far more operationally detailed than Beck’s treatment here.
The book is very short and easy to finish in a day, but it reads more like a series of stitched blog posts than a structured argument. The best parts are the financial analogies and a few historical nuggets. Worth a quick read for those, but I don’t feel it added much to my development toolkit.
In the introduction, Beck writes, “I make money with writing so I can afford to write… So yes, I want to make a little coin with this, but I intend to offer far more value than I charge.” Given the relatively steep price for such a short book, I didn’t feel it delivered on that promise.