Steve McConnell - Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

If you haven't had much formal training, you're in good company. About 50,000 new developers enter the profession each year (BLS 2004, Hecker 2004), but only about 35,000 software-related degrees are awarded each year (NCES 2002). From these figures it's a short hop to the conclusion that many programmers don't receive a formal education in software development. Self-taught programmers are found in the emerging group of professionalsengineers, accountants, scientists, teachers, and smallbusiness ownerswho program as part of their jobs but who do not necessarily view themselves as programmers. Regardless of the extent of your programming education, this handbook can give you insight into effective programming practices.

This book synthesizes construction techniques from a variety of sources. In addition to being widely scattered, much of the accumulated wisdom about construction has resided outside written sources for years (Hildebrand 1989, McConnell 1997a). There is nothing mysterious about the effective, high-powered programming techniques used by expert programmers. In the day-to-day rush of grinding out the latest project, however, few experts take the time to share what they have learned. Consequently, programmers may have difficulty finding a good source of programming information.

The techniques described in this book fill the void after introductory and advanced programming texts. After you have read Introduction to Java , Advanced Java , and Advanced Advanced Java , what book do you read to learn more about programming? You could read books about the details of Intel or Motorola hardware, Microsoft Windows or Linux operating-system functions, or another programming languageyou can't use a language or program in an environment without a good reference to such details. But this is one of the few books that discusses programming per se. Some of the most beneficial programming aids are practices that you can use regardless of the environment or language you're working in. Other books generally neglect such practices, which is why this book concentrates on them.

The information in this book is distilled from many sources, as shown below. The only other way to obtain the information you'll find in this handbook would be to plow through a mountain of books and a few hundred technical journals and then add a significant amount of real-world experience. If you've already done all that, you can still benefit from this book's collecting the information in one place for easy reference.

Whatever your background, this handbook can help you write better programs in less time and with fewer headaches.

Complete software-construction reference. This handbook discusses general aspects of construction such as software quality and ways to think about programming. It gets into nitty-gritty construction details such as steps in building classes, ins and outs of using data and control structures, debugging, refactoring, and code-tuning techniques and strategies. You don't need to read it cover to cover to learn about these topics. The book is designed to make it easy to find the specific information that interests you.

Ready-to-use checklists. This book includes dozens of checklists you can use to assess your software architecture, design approach, class and routine quality, variable names, control structures, layout, test cases, and much more.