Code Complete, Second Edition (book)

Code Complete by Steve McConnell is the convergence (the crossroads) of experience, research, and theory. This book is invaluable, the Holy Grail of programming reference books. McConnell's writing style is clear, concise, easy to understand and often humorous.

Programmers on every level (from introduction to master) will benefit from reading this book. Programmers at the introduction level may find some topics advanced, but references to additional resources are close at hand. This book covers a broad range of interconnected topics ranging from: variable names, code-tuning, personal character, managing your manager, gonzo programming and much more. The emphasis is always on successful software design techniques.

McConnell nails the "hows", "whats" and most importantly the "whys"(with hard data) that so many other texts seem to avoid.

It's interesting to note that Code Complete is a required read to become a practitioner (intermediate) level employee in McConnell's company (www.construx.com).

Selected quotes from Code Complete:

"People have already made all the mistakes that you're making now, and unless you're a glutton for punishment, you'll prefer reading their books and avoiding their mistakes to inventing new versions of old problems." (Chapter 35)

"Once a programmer realizes that programming principles transcend the syntax of any specific language, the doors swing open to knowledge that truly makes a difference in quality and productivity." (Preface)

"The value of hands-on experience as compared to book learning is smaller in software development than in many other fields" (Chapter 35)

I prefer Code Complete over the Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master [Andrew Hunt]; the topics discussed in the Pragmatic Programmer are a subset of Code Complete. Code Complete is written at a higher level and offers more references for continued personal development.
Read both, the Pragmatic Programmer makes a good prerequisite to Code Complete.

Absolute must-read for the developer turned manager! My recommendation is that you glean a summary of your favorite excerpts and share them with your whole team.

The book is what I was looking for. It describes how do construct a smart program. The focus is on construction and not on design so there is only a short overview of good design although they tell you 1000 times to take more time in designing than in coding.
But a very good book anyway.

This book is a rather complete reference on programming discipline.

To get to know all the information gathered in this book one have to read a lot of books.

The book allows you to determine easily which areas you are not familiar with and gives a lot of references for futher reading, even including references to IEEE standards.

The book is a must read for all beginner programmers.

Professionals may find it interesting to see whether they agree with this book or not as this book represents modern views on software construction.

In spite on gathering facts and ideas from all the programing world this book is surprisingly solid, but I had to read it from the end to the beginning, as it was more natural for me.


Unfortunately this book does not even mention functional programming and ISO s/w development process certification. I'd also like to see benchmark results of Object Pascal code along with VB/Java/C++. But nothing is perfect.

This is an excellent book. Software life cycle can be divided into multiple stages: requirements specification, architectural design, writing code, testing and deployment. This book is covering one stage of the software life cycle, which is software construction (writing code).
The book is great, giving a lot of real world's statistical data to support and explain each point.
The book covers software construction in a great detail, explaining and discussing every possible point related to writing code.
The only criticism that was said about this book is that it didn't mention or discuss security related issues in code construction, but I think that this doesn't decrease the value of the book.