I finally decided a little light reading was in order, so I’m making my way through the second edition of Steve McConnells excellent Code Complete. It isn’t a quick read at over 900 pages, but I think it is essential reading for anyone who aspires to professionalism in software development. If you’ve been programming for a while, most of the book will simply formalize practices you already employ, but I would challenge anyone to study all 900 pages without learning at least a few things that would make them better developers.

I just wanted to post a little about the section on “reasons to create a class” (page 152 onwards). I think it provides some great heuristics when trying to decide how to break your application into classes as opposed to just coming up with a domain model (which are two separate tasks).

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