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Comment on Ask HN: I just inherited 700K+ lines of bad PHP. Advice?parent

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> First read the Fowler's 'Refactoring' book; it was written just for you.

"Refactoring" is not the tool for the job, although it's a nice sidearm.

What OP needs is the big gun, Feathers's "working effectively with legacy code": http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fea...

As the title hints, it was written specifically and expressly for the "I just got a huge amount of complete shit of a codebase shoved unto me, how do I survive". Just check the TOC of part 2 (the meat of the book): http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/software-engineering-an...

> And of course, make sure your client acknowledges that it's a giant clusterf...

That's hugely important. No promises of delivery, and that the client understands it's not a cakewalk.

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