PHPMaster.com has returned with the second part of their guide to code refactoring. In this second part they pick up where they left off and focus on code readability this time.
In part one of this series I introduced what constitutes good code. As the series on code refactoring continues we’ll dive into each of the three aspects and see how to refactor for each of them in order: readability, extensibility, and efficiency. In this part, the focus is on refactoring your code for better readability. Recall the definition of readability: readable code follows some well-known style and documentation practices. To help you start refactoring your code for readability, I’ve prepared this list of questions you should ask yourself throughout the development, testing, and review process.
There's a few different types of things that contribute to readable code, so he breaks the article up into a few sections:
- General things like coding style guides, header comments and a reduction of global code
- Naming conventions, well-named variables and methods
- Simplified and easy to use expressions
- Blocks of code, their average size and complexity.