Advice to Beginner Programmers

 From Beginning Python by Peter C. Norton et al. (Wrox, 2005):

The trend in personal computers has been away from reliability and toward software being built on top of other, unreliable, software.  The results that you live with might have you believing that computers are malicious and arbitrary beasts, existing to taunt you with unbearable amounts of extra work and various harassments while you're already trying to accomplish something.  If you do feel this way, you already know that you're not alone.  However, after you've learned how to program, you gain an understanding of how this situation has come to pass, and perhaps you'll find that you can do better than some of the programmers whose software you have used.

This make a refreshing change from the gee-whizzery that seems to infect most beginners books.

The Best Software Writing selected and introduced by Joel Spolsky

A collection of articles on software development culled from various sources on the web.  Very similar in scope to 'Joel on Software' but here Joel only writes the introductions, so it tends to be a bit more fragmented.  However, it is still good fun to read.

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

A collection of essays on software development written by one of the leading gurus in the field. The majority of the essays deal with the practice of programming and managing developers, especially within a small software company. They are interesting, pragmatic, relevant, authoritative and funny.

A couple of quotables:

... the history of the evolution of C++ can be described as a history of trying to plug the leaks in the string abstraction.

The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down ("lie"), and drill that lie home.

All of the essays have previously been published on the author's web-site but the book also includes some new introductions and, besides, a book is much more convenient for reading in the bath, or on the train.

Eiffel and 'Design by Contract'

Tony Hoare famously wrote of the programming language ALGOL 60 that it was "so far ahead of its time  that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors".  In a way, the same could also be said of Eiffel, a pure object-oriented programming language designed by Bertrand Meyer in 1985.  The key to Eiffel's superiority over "nearly all of its successors" is the idea of 'design by contract' (DBC). This idea provides key insights into many areas of programming and programming language design, and Meyer has used it to produce clean solutions to problems which have given rise to unnecessarily complex messes in other languages. The best exposition of 'Design by Contract' remains Meyer's book 'Object Oriented Software Construction' (2nd Edition) but Eiffel Software (the company founded by Meyer) also have some nice Macromedia Flash introductions to Eiffel and Design by Contract at http://www.eiffel.com/developers/presentations/.