
Code Complete - DanielBMarkham
http://hn-books.com/Books/Code-Complete.htm
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plinkplonk
ok I'll go against the grain here but I personally found this book very
tedious and of little value to me. But then I had been programming
professionally many years when I encountered this book so maybe I was not part
of the intended audience.

(Then again I found "Godel, Escher, Bach", another book that is almost
universally lauded hereabouts, to be frothy and pretentious. So maybe it is
just that I am weird.)

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zwieback
I'm with you on Goedel, Escher, Bach. Also, thanks for "frothy and
pretentious" - adding it to my verbal arsenal now...

I like CC but also agree it's of less use to the seasoned programmer than to
beginners. Then again, seasoning doesn't necessarily produce good habits.

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cpeterso
_Code Complete_ was an epiphany for me. I read it right before graduating from
university and it was great preparation for real-world programming _work_.

The other programming epiphany books for me were:

    
    
      * Eric Evans' "Domain-Driven Design"
      * Steve Maguire's "Writing Solid Code"
      * and SICP

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crcarlson
This is one of the books I had waiting on the desk of any new employee that I
hired in the last 5 years. The whole book is a must read, but for me
personally I referenced the sections on coding conventions and defensive
programming for new employees all of the time.

The other practice I picked up from Steve was stepping through each code
execution branch in the debugger to informally confirm the correct behavior
when I was building w/o explicit unit tests.

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DanielBMarkham
This is one of those books that sometimes I wish I could force people to read.

