Improving the design of existing code by refactoring

Another software engineering book I read recently is "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler. According to the author,

Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improve its internal structure. It is a disciplined way to clean up code that minimize the chances of introducing bugs. In essence when you refractor you are improving the design of the code after it has been written.

The book is practical in nature; it not just explains the principles but provides a detailed account of over 70 commonly used refactorings. As vividly explained by the author in the first paragraph of Chapter 1, "Refactoring, a First Example", "it is with examples that I [the author] can see what is going on." This approach fits my style perfectly: to really understand a topic, I always find a worked example far more effective than general principles. While the examples in the book are illustrated in Java, the basic ideas can be applied well to other object-oriented or even procedural languages (such as C).

Over the years since I left Dr. Olson's laboratory at Rutgers, I have been maintaining and continuously refining 3DNA. I have taken each user's question as an opportunity to fix bugs and improve its design, thus making the code more robust and efficient. The majority of my efforts, as I now realize, is "refactoring" existing 3DNA code to make it easier to maintain and extend. Reading through this book gives me the chance to put my practices into a broader context. I will surely take advantage of some refactoring examples from the book for further refinements of 3DNA.