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Working Effectively with Legacy CodeBook

by Michael Feathers, 2004

Who uses, recommends or left Working Effectively with Legacy Code, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

2 people

Gergely Orosz
Writer of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter and books on software engineering careers; previously an engineering manager at Uber, Skype and Skyscanner.
loved

Legacy code has no test and is not written to be testable. Touching it this sphaghetti code somewhere breaks the system. And to refactor safely, we'd need to have tests first... but where to start? This book gives practical suggestions

His continuously-updated public reading list of software engineering and management books, newsletters and podcasts he recommends (page last modified 2024-12-16; the page states none of the links are affiliate or sponsored).

2024-12-16·blog.pragmaticengineer.com ↗

Adam Tornhill
Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology; author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.
recommended

First, Refactoring, Domain-Driven Design, and the Pragmatic Programmer are all classics for a reason. Amazing books, and mandatory reads. Working Effectively with Legacy Code deserves all its praise, and of course everyone (yes, really) should check out the Mythical Man-Month.

A post naming the pre-2015 programming books that changed how he thinks about code, plus his take on the usual classics.

2026-08-11·adamtornhill.substack.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

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The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

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