Next up in the book review series: Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design by Robert Martin. Although I've loved a lot of the other books by Uncle Bob, I have to admit this one disappointed me and I'll explain why in this book review.

The computer, phone or tablet you're reading this on is hardware. The browser that renders it is software. Firmware is somewhere in between. But is it that simple?

I'm starting this book review series with the infamous book about design patterns. For those who don't know which book I'm talking about: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, written by Erich Gamma, John Vlissides, Ralph Johnson, and Richard Helm.

This book has been considered by many as a reference that everybody should read (and I count myself in these as well). I do think the book does not need to be read in it's entirety for the reader to use it's concepts.

I started my programming career in a large waterfall company working on their C++ software. We had multiple layers of analysis documents describing what should be done to implement each feature. We had no unit tests. The software was so large the current version of Visual Studio couldn't handle it all. It took so much time to compile (over six hours to compile everything) that we were doing partial compilations refering to a nightly build and it still took over an hour to build if you had enough code modified. Launching the software to test your features often took over 5 minutes. We were working on two different features at the same time because of all the waiting and you worked on your features alone for weeks if not months at a time. The company was hiring developpers by batches of 20 to 30 and giving them two weeks of classes when they started. Refactoring was pretty much out of the question because we couldn't deliver features fast enough.

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