Roy Ganor has posted a new article on the Zend Developer Zone about code refactoring, what it's good for and how it can help you and your code.

At first, refactoring seemed to me to be magic, over the years I have come to view it as more of a trick, and today refactoring is integrated into my development environment and used frequently and quickly. Using the refactoring functionality, in addition to other tools, I can sculpt the code to improve legibility and maintainability.

He talks about why PHP developers should jump on getting to refactoring their code, the different forms of refactoring, code examples showing it at work and some development tools/resources you can use to dig a little deeper.