Chapter 11. Refactoring Your Code

The goal of refactoring is to make system-wide code changes without affecting the behavior of a program. The principal motivation is to make the software easier to understand and cheaper to modify. The term refactoring had been used for years by the Smalltalk community, but it only became widespread following publication of Martin Fowler's definitive book, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. The concepts are powerful, but they also can be time-consuming to apply.

Eclipse provides an extensive list of commands that automate your Java code refactoring. Many commands that appear to be simple, such as Move and Rename, are actually refactoring operations—for example, moving and renaming Java elements ...

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