Olivier Langlois's blog

It could have been a good book since the topic is interesting. All developers know what spaghetti code is or how adding features quickly on top of a prototype without modifying the software architecture can lead to a big blob of unmaintainable code. I took this book in hope to learn other bad software development habits in order to avoid them. Despite the potential, this book does not deliver it. It start with a lengthy and half comprehensible 60 pages introduction followed by a catalog of antipatterns where most of them are empty of value. Out of around 30 antipatterns, I would estimate to less than 5 the number of antipattern descriptions interesting. Examples of useless antipatterns are:

Bad management; proposed solution: The manager must become aware of his problem in order to change.
e-mail arguments; proposed solution: Call a meeting to come to an agreement instead of wasting time writing e-mails.