Programmers, engineers, scientists, students, and others who work with C or If you want to write better code without wading through a maze of technical material, this concise yet pithy guide is precisely the tool you need. Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot offers well over 100 rules of thumb you can use to create elegant, maintainable code. And since it comes from an acknowledged expert in the field, you can't go wrong. Allen Holub provides an indispensable set of guidelines, tips, and techniques to help you use these extremely powerful languages to the fullest potential. But don't expect another dry programming guide. Holub manages to make a serious subject refreshingly readable by sprinkling the text with humor and insight.
The book was written in 1995 and based on examples of C/C++, but it did not put a limit to universality of the rules in time, space and programming languages including Java! Here is a number of answers the author gives to the questions you have never imagined to ask:
Why humanitarian would be better programmers than engineers Why comments are important Why uncommented code has no value When inheritance is appropriate and when it is a highest evil? Why proper and consistent code formatting is important Why names should be carefully selected Why goto is not an evil if used properly? Why pointers is not a danger How to design a class so that it looks a true class than a toy