Staff Picks: "Naming Things" by Tom Benner
“Naming is one of the most difficult and enduring challenges in software engineering, but few of us do it well. This practical and comprehensive book provides a set of principles, rules, and application guidelines for efficiently choosing good names in your code.
These skills can be used throughout your career, and they’re useful for every programming language, technical domain, and experience level. The book incorporates real-world examples to illustrate how to choose good names and avoid bad names”— Provided by publisher.
Recommendation from Patrick Wallace, Digital Projects & Archives Librarian:
Working with code, data, and digital records, and other sorts of structured information means working with many kinds of named elements: files, folders, variables, functions, classes, identifiers, attributes, spreadsheet column headings, and so on.
Though it is aimed mainly at software engineers, Naming Things is essentially like Strunk & White’s Elements of Style for anyone who produces code, metadata, quantitative datasets, or other information that depends—as the title suggests—on naming things. It is a slim, concise handbook packed with clear rules and guidelines to make code, data, and metadata more usable, readable, portable, and intelligible through good naming practices.
I have recommended this book to a number of colleagues, as well as friends who work in tech, finance, and data-centered business consulting (some of whom have since made it required reading for their newly hired employees), and I personally consider it one of the most useful handbooks on my own professional-interest shelf.
Get It!
Borrow Naming Things from the library.
Citation: Benner, T. (2023). Naming things : the hardest problem in software engineering (Second edition.) Independently published.