Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Clean Code has become a seminal text in software engineering, articulating principles and practices for creating maintainable, readable, and efficient code. Robert C. Martin ("Uncle Bob") distills decades of experience into practical guidance that remains relevant despite the changing technology landscape.

The book is organized into three parts. The first covers principles, patterns, and practices of clean code. The second demonstrates these ideas through increasingly complex case studies where code is iteratively improved. The final section collects a set of heuristics and "smells" to help identify problems in code.

What distinguishes Clean Code is its focus on the human aspect of programming. Martin argues persuasively that code should be optimized for human understanding, not just machine execution. This perspective transforms coding from a technical task into a form of communication between developers.