The book by Robert C. Martin “Clean Code” is a really very useful material for all programmers. You can disagree with him sometimes (as I do), but it still provides some useful notes that helped me to place my programmer experience and knowledge where they belong. Here I’ll provide some key notes that I did while reading the book and that I’d like to memorize.

What you as a programmer SHOULD DO:

1. Give everything meaningful, searchable and pronounceable names.
2. Use names that other programmers can understand. Remember that the code is for programmers, not customers.
3. Functions should be small and smaller than that.
4. Functions should do one thing. They should do it well. They should do it only.
5. The ideal number of arguments for a function is zero. Max 3.
6. Prefer exceptions to returning error codes. Create informative error messages.
7. Prefer meaningful names to comments.
8. Write JavaDoc only for public API’s.
9. Format your code. While working in a team use a single formatting style.
10. Test your code with clean tests. Remember that test code is just as important as production code.
11. Test just one concept per test.
12. Test should follow the FIRST rule:

Fast -  tests should be fast.
Independent - tests should not depend on each other
Repeatable - tests should be repeatable in any environment
Self-validating – the test should have a boolean output
Timely - write unit tests before the production code.

What you as a programmer should AVOID:
1. Avoid encoding
2. Avoid duplicate code. Watch out not only duplicate functions but also duplicate functionality.
3. Avoid noisy, redundant, uninformative comments. Remember that one of the more common motivations for writing comments is bad code.