By coincidence, I read this recently, after following a reference from Growing Object-Oriented Software (http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/ http:/

By coincidence, I read this recently, after following a reference from Growing Object-Oriented Software (http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/ http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/) by Freeman and Pryce (which is also highly recommended). It contains a lot of clearly-expressed wisdom and practical techniques for when you're given one of those systems to fix (which is too often for my liking, but there you go). The authors are deceptively insightful in that, after you've read the book, you feel like you should have always known a lot of the contents. In this way, it's a bit like Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code, which it complements nicely.