FWIW, one useful tidbit from Uncle Bob that I keep thinking about is how the number of working programmers has doubled every five years.

http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html

That insight helped me calm down quite a bit. Because noobs are being produced faster than best practices can percolate. Per Mark Twain's quip about lies racing half-way around the world before truth can get its pants on, every generation thinking they invented sex, and how people are generally emotionally attached to their first notions (no matter how wrong).

(So if your introduction to computing is thru Python, PHP, JavaScript or whatever, it's super hard to see their flaws, or to appreciate what their precedents were trying to achieve.)

I appreciate Uncle Bob's opinionated approach. The easy path would be to remain agnostic on which way is best. But that often, at least for me, results in design paralysis as I try to figure out that magic best way to organize a project or accomplish some task.

Instead, if I start with an opinion, I'm able to make immediate progress even if I end up refactoring down the road for some reason or another.

Of course there's no single write way to organize projects and write software. But one mediocre way that makes sense to me right now is often preferable to 10 better ways that I don't yet understand.

I like Clean Code and Code Complete.

Clean Code has a narrative and is opinionated. It explains the experiences that formed those opinions. It is a better read.

Code Complete is dry, academic, and comprehensive for its scope. It references many studies and is well documented. It has opinions too of a sort. It is a better reference.

Thinking of function length - Clean Code says short functions are good. Code Complete references studies that say it is not long functions that are bad, it is functions using too many objects/variables that are bad. This of course has an indirect effect on function length. So I keep this in mind, and both books are helpful.

I read a bunch of Uncle Bob's books and usually don't mind him being opinionated, although I did think the opinions in Clean Coder got to be too much. Although not all of it. Recently I have been mulling the idea from that book that there should be zero regressions. I think there is something to that, if you start to accept there can be 2-3 regressions per sprint, then why not 5-7? Why not 10? I agree with him that acceptance of regressions is a problem.

> It is not overly opinionated, it is direct, it tries to support the statements it makes.

Totally. I appreciated that he actually cited actual studies of commercial software projects, such comparisons of defects found in code reviews vs tests or defects vs function length.

What books of Bob's do you think manipulate you? Specifically the books, rather than blog posts or tweets.