Classic Coding Tome Updated

Tim Halloran writes "Steve McConnell has updated his book 'Code Complete' a 960 page language agnostic tome about code construction. This is the best book of its type I've ever encountered and the update is welcome (as the first edition is over a decade old...I suddenly feel as I'm getting old :-). More information, and a sample chapter are here. As a programming team lead I have provided this book to team members to get them critically thinking about how they write code."

Comments

Re:What level is this appropriate for?

[Quarters]

Read the Preface .pdf. It spells out exactly what the author thinks Experienced Programmers, Technical Leads, Self-Taught Programmers, and Students will get out of the book.

Testimonial

[baruz]

I learned to program in grade school, taking little projects from Computer Recreations and implementing them in MS Basic for the Macintosh. This was not the most conducive way to learn to program in a disciplined fashion, and yet in the early nineties I found myself having to program to spec and to schedule for various people, and not doing too well. It was not until I picked up the first edition of this gem that I truly understood that the craft could be approached as a discipline, that code quality does matter to software quality, and that a well-constructed program is more maintainable and extensible.

If all McConnell did was slap a new cover on it, it would be worth looking into if you've never read it. But he put several chapters out last spring for review, comment, and critique, including some all-new chapters. I'm definitely picking it up when it becomes available.

Re:Many obvious statements

[Anonymous Coward]

That is one of the nice things about the book. Everything is documented, and you can go to the source for more information. In this case, the source is:

Miaria, Richard J., et al. 1983. "Program Indentation and Comprehensibility" Communications of the ACM 26, no 11 (November): 861-67