I saw this nice Code Smell summary at Berkeley thanks to Diederik Krols’ anti-pattern blog. The Code Smell Summary (or maybe it’s a cheat sheet) gives nice overviews of bad code practices, (briefly) explains why they’re bad, and provides links to refactoring.com‘s illustrations and examples to demonstrate the problems and the cures.

Reviewing the code smell summary will help you become more aware of problem code in your own projects. Then if you really want feedback on your code, you can start using code analysis tools like FxCop or NDepend. 🙂

You can also read through some of the common refactorings as well as this list of database refactorings, although there’s some sifting required to get to the real “a ha, that’s a good idea!” stuff. I will say that the refactoring sites don’t provide much explanation on why the ideas should be followed, presumably so that we’ll be forced to buy the books.