When comparing Professional Software Development vs Working Effectively with Legacy Code by by Michael C. Feathers, the Slant community recommends Professional Software Development for most people. In the question“What are the best books on software development?” Professional Software Development is ranked 2nd while Working Effectively with Legacy Code by by Michael C. Feathers is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Professional Software Development is:
Has illustrations and whimsical cartoons.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Not dry and boring
Has illustrations and whimsical cartoons.
Pro Book that focuses existing codebases
Many books focus on new greenfield code base. How to create new code with best practices in mind. This book on contrary tries to help developers to deal with the code that is old, hard to change without the fear of breaking and not covered by any tests.
Pro Techniques that can be used with any language or platform
Examples are in Java, C++, C, and C#
Cons
Con Does not offer "the best" solution
The techniques from this code might not be the cleanest solution that you might get from the others books, but it doesn't aim to provide one. These can be hacks, code smells and just nasty code, but they are better that what was there before and allow you to take your code to a testable state. After you get your code covered by tests, then you can refactor and re-architect it to something better. This book provides a place to start in situations where many may think only a full-rewrite is an option.