Humans, being complex and fickle, create complex and fickle things. However, dealing with other people and their code is an unavoidable part of being a programmer. Whether we deal with libraries and frameworks constructed by someone else or inherit entire legacy code bases, the challenges are similar. The first step should always be to seek an understanding of the code and its paradigms. When we have a full understanding of the code, we can begin to interface with it in a clean way, enabling us to create new functionality or make improvements on top of existing work. In this chapter, we'll be exploring this topic in more detail and, through the lens of clean code, considering how we can individually take actions to make other people's code less of a pain to deal with.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Inheriting code
• Dealing with third-party code