Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

"It’s a pretty long book. It’s like Clean Code but it goes further. Clean Code gives examples in Java; this one gives examples in several different languages, to emphasize that the concepts it’s teaching aren’t language-specific and should be applicable to any language. It doesn’t teach you the code, it teaches you the software construction: commenting, classes, debugging, refactoring… While Clean Code teaches best practices to individuals who are writing code for themselves, Code Complete is for people working in industry, writing software for companies, which means they’re giving their code to other people. It even has little checklists at key points in the book; if you are in industry, you can make sure that your code is readable and debugged by going through these checklists and making sure you’re touching upon all aspects. So it’s definitely more geared toward industry. If you have an interest in going into that, this would be the book to read. It’s a pretty old book, but it’s still very relevant. I remember my dad reading it. Code Complete goes a step beyond cleaning your code, and makes sure that it is also deployable, or works at a larger scale in the context of a company or an industry. But having clean code would be enough to be a pretty good programmer."