I think https://qntm.org/clean makes a good case that the advice it gives can be taken to very bad extremes -- and that the author of the book does so in some cases when providing "good" examples. That's not to say that the advice is all bad, but that the book as a whole is not a good presentation and inexperienced programmers can enthusiastically learn the wrong lessons from it.

Edit: grabbed the wrong link from my history. Updated to the correct link.

I think the root problem is that a lot of people want books to tell them how to think. I think that's why I hate things like Oprah book clubs, complete with quizzes to make sure you think the right things now.

My best reading experiences involve arguing with the book. And talking about those books and my disagreements with them has been useful, too.

Orthogonally, all humans tend to overuse new knowledge/skills. That's part of how humans learn. We try to find out how far the use stretches and in what ways we can apply our new toys! I would expect any successful book on practices to be seen as overused.

In my opinion, the only significant contribution Clean Code made was the concept of clean code. The problem is that my definition of clean code is almost completely contradictory to what the author of the book thinks constitutes clean code.

Honestly it’s DRY that I oppose more than anything else, I’ve watched too many codebases turn into unreadable spaghetti because engineers thought everything needed to be abstracted. With regard to Clean Code, I think Uncle Bob’s takes on function length are ridiculous (something like “functions should almost never be over 4 lines”). In general, I just feel like he thinks very little of programmers and comes up with rules with an eye towards constraining bad programmers, not empowering good programmers.

Here’s a great example of why it could be ineffective: https://youtu.be/tD5NrevFtbU