The Practice of Programming, by Kernighan and Pike, is one of my favourite books about programming. The book covers style, algorithms and data structures, design and implementation, interfaces, debugging, testing, performance, portability, and notation, in a clear, readable and understandable style that is lacking in many other technical books.
Each chapter is short, stands alone, peppered with examples, and summed up neatly at the end. Reading this book didn’t automatically make me a better programmer, but it encouraged me to think about programming, and gave me solid advice for the troubles ahead.
Littered with war stories, the chapters take you through example code, asking questions, and providing some answers. They don’t tell you how code should look, but explore how code can be improved. (Aside, the first chapter in its entirety was reprinted another book “Beautiful Code”).
Don’t loan it to friends, they might never return it—One of my copies spent five years with a co-worker who proclaimed that they’d read it, but kept going back to it for advice in times of trouble. I can’t blame them.