Sadly to say, I have only now come across this wonderful book, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction. But as they say, better now than never. The above book is highly recommended to those who are interested in improving the way that they write code and to reduce the headaches associated with code maintenance.

The key points mentioned by this book are

• Software construction is the central activity in software development; construction is the only activity that's guaranteed to happen on every project.
• The main activities in construction are detailed design, coding, debugging and developer testing.
• Other common terms for construction are "coding and debugging" and "programming".
• The quality of the construction substantially affects the quality of the software.
• In the final analysis, your understanding of how to do construction determines how good a programmer you are.

Some light humour and the various stories included makes this guide a very readable one.