Writing Elegant and Readable Code

In this tutorial, we will give you nine practical techniques for writing elegant and readable code,by wisely choosing names for variables, functions, and methods, being consistent when writing code, and breaking complex problems into manageable chunks. We won't be talking about specific architectures, languages, or platforms. The focus lies on writing better code.

If you're a developer, then there probably have been times when you've written code and, after a few days, weeks, or months, you looked back at it and said to yourself "What does this piece of code do?" The answer to that question might have been "I really don't know!" In that case, the only thing you can do is going through the code from start to finish, trying to understand what you were thinking when you wrote it.

This mostly happens when we're lazy and we just want to implement that new feature the client asked for. We just want to get the job done with as little effort as possible. And when it works, we don't care about the code itself, because the client won't ever see the ugly truth, let alone understand it. Right? Wrong. These days, collaborating on software has become the default and people will see, read, and inspect the code that you write. Even if your code isn't scrutinized by your colleagues, you should make it a habit to write clear and readable code. Always.