This book didn’t help me—but I read it after I’d been in the software industry for many years. If I saw some fresh-faced kid come out of school saying, “All I gotta do is come up with some nifty algorithm, and making a product out of it is a piece of cake,” I would hand that kid this book.

I’ve only gotten through the first few chapters, but these are enormously helpful already. All the concepts in this book apply to just about any sort of programming one will do. The book teaches proper style (and explains why it is so crucial), debugging techniques, and more. It’s not intended for amateur coders like myself, but I’m still getting some great value out of it and will read it over more thoroughly later down the line.