Certainly no book can cover all the best practices to write best code but this book has done good attempt. Must read for all the fresh grads and developers before they start writing production code!

This book quickly reminded me that the "old school" rules to software development will always apply, no matter how many new labels you put on it (e.g. Agile). It was recommended to me by a college professor aside from the regular classroom reading we had to complete. And I was more than happy I purchased it and added it to my bookshelf.

This book has been recently recommended to me by Amazon based on my previous purchase habits and I decided to go take a look at its description. At first, I was little bit skeptic about the value of a book published in 1993 and prepared with Word for Windows 2.0 because software programming has changed a lot since then! However, it was a very low risk purchase because of its very low price tag so I decided to give it a try and I have been pleasantly surprised!

This book is the proof that that there are few things in programming that are timeless. Errors of the past still occur today. The programming language used for the examples is C but what is taught is also applicable to C++ programming as well. Topics discussed in the book are: assertions, integrity checks, stepping through code with a debugger, how to not design interfaces that are error prone, avoid language features that are error prone and finally the author conclude his book by describing the attitude that a programmer should have. Among other things, a programmer should prioritize safe code before micro-optimizations. All these concepts are written in a style easy to understand filled with anecdotes that make this book a pleasant read.

To conclude, I have not been blown away by the content of this book but I have learn one thing or two and I am glad that I have read it especially with its very low price tag.

I would not read this book now but I'm so sorry the author does not write an updated one! This book really changed the way I wrote code.

You may not be impressed when you see that this is a Microsoft book. You may get bored at the beginning when all the examples are C and most about memory management. But it's worth persisting and reading onward, because sooner or later, some of the examples will look familiar. Simple concepts about what kind of coding leads to more defects, and what kinds are "solid" or robust.