Who is Martin Fowler?

Martin Fowler is a British software developer, author, and speaker. He’s Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks and one of the most well-known personalities in software development.

I remember when I was first starting out, Martin Fowler was very often referenced. Senior engineers had his books on their desks, people linked to his blog posts, and he was just a widely known and referenced person. His blog at martinfowler.com is still widely read by developers worldwide.

He’s written many well-known software engineering books, too many to list here, but here are a few of my favorites:

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code - This is the canonical guide to refactoring, first published in 1999. It’s the book that taught an entire generation of developers how to improve code without changing its behavior. If you’ve only got time for one Fowler book, this is it.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - This book catalogs fundamental patterns for building enterprise applications. Things like Active Record, Data Mapper, and Repository Pattern are all explained here. It’s especially valuable if you work with databases and web applications.

His influence on modern development is hard to overstate. Whether you realize it or not, if you’re writing code today, you’re probably using techniques that Fowler helped popularize.