On PHPMaster.com they've started up a new series focused on refactoring code to make your applications not only easier to maintain but easier to expand on in the future. In this first part they focus on what the term "good code" really means.
The main goal of refactoring is clean code, better code, or whatever you might call it. But what actually constitutes good code? Good code is smelled and tasted. If you’ve written a lot of code, you understand what I mean; you can easily identify whether code is good or bad with experience. But what if you are new to coding but still want to do things right? We can summarize the aspects of good code with these three guidelines: Readable, Extensible and Efficient
He goes on to explain each of these three guidelines with descriptions of what they are and what they mean to you as a developer. In the next part of the series, he'll take these three ideas and apply them to code, showing some of the most common points where they can be applied to clean things up.