"He who lives by the rule book dies by the rule book." --A.J. Rimmer We use Clean Code in one of our classes here at the university. What I tell my students is

"He who lives by the rule book dies by the rule book." --A.J. Rimmer We use Clean Code in one of our classes here at the university. What I tell my students is that they should take every piece of programming advice, and form their own rationalized opinion about that advice. And no matter what you think the right thing is, half the internet is probably going to disagree with you. What's important, is that you assess the situation, draw upon your knowledge to code up the "best" solution, and have an opinionated rationale for why you did it that way. Five years from now, you're going to look back at all your college code and be amazed at how crap it is. But what's important is that by having these opinionated rationales for the work you do, you are continuously learning how to make your code better. And you're doing it in a flexible way. Sometimes rules should be broken for the greater good.