This book from Michael C. Feathers came at a perfect moment in my software developer's life, as I started to read it right before I came to work on a legacy monstrosity.
The book is well organized, easy to ready and full of practical guidelines and best practices for taming the legacy codebases that are lurking out there.
I really appreciated Michael's definition of legacy code: for him "it is simply code without tests". And, indeed, untested code is both the cause and the characteristic of legacy code.
Near the end of the book, Michael has written a short chapter titled "We feel overwhelmed" that I have found encouraging and inspiring. Yes, working with legacy code can actually be fun if you look at it on the right side. My experience in this domain is that increasing test coverage is elating, deleting dead code and inane comments is bliss and seeing design emerge where only chaos existed is ecstatic.
Conclusion: read this book if you are dealing with today's legacy code or if you do not want to build tomorrow's.
