Book Image

Refactoring TypeScript

By : James Hickey
Book Image

Refactoring TypeScript

By: James Hickey

Overview of this book

Refactoring improves your code without changing its behavior. With refactoring, the best approach is to apply small targeted changes to a codebase. Instead of doing a huge sweeping change to your code, refactoring is better as a long-term and continuous enterprise. Refactoring TypeScript explains how to spot bugs and remove them from your code. You’ll start by seeing how wordy conditionals, methods, and null checks make code unhealthy and unstable. Whether it is identifying messy nested conditionals or removing unnecessary methods, this book will show various techniques to avoid these pitfalls and write code that is easier to understand, maintain, and test. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned some of the main causes of unhealthy code, tips to identify them and techniques to address them.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Identification

At times, even after we have tried to make the various parts of our code as small and modular as we can, there are cases when we still have to create some complex objects.

In a hypothetical software project that's being used in the airline industry, you might come across code like this:

const plane = new Airplane();
plane.type = PlaneType.Passenger;
plane.engine = new PassengerPlaneEngine();
plane.hasFirstClass = true;
plane.hasBathroom = false;
plane.numberOfSeats = 100;
// etc.

As a smaller sample of a larger piece of code, this might not look too bad.

What you'll probably find is that this kind of code will be copied and pasted into other places. So, whenever we need to create a passenger plane that has 100 seats, someone might decide to copy and paste this code just this one time.

Especially in teams with less experienced developers (even developers who've been in the industry for years can be inexperienced!), you'll often find...