I find that reading books rather than code tends to be more helpful in terms of finding good takes on what clean code is -- more specifically books on refactori

I find that reading books rather than code tends to be more helpful in terms of finding good takes on what clean code is -- more specifically books on refactoring or specific language-related features (like 'Effective Java' or 'Fluent Python'). The issue with just reading code is that many times - you'll miss out on why the author chose to use the expression or abstractions which they chose to use. Reading a book at least takes you through author's thought process. For an alternative - you could always browse repositories which contain notes on refactoring as well like this one (which does a good job summarizing some of the key principles from Fowler's book on refactoring): https://github.com/HugoMatilla/Refactoring-Summary https://github.com/HugoMatilla/Refactoring-Summary