I too would favour Steve McConnell's _Code Complete_ over Jeff's blog-post collection but having read the book when it came out, i.e. not recently, I wasn't too keen overall, perhaps it was McConnell's Microsoft background.

My preference is Kernighan and Pike's _The Practice of Programming_, TPoP, that's Kernighan as in the `k' in awk and K&R, and Pike as in Blit, sam, and now #golang. The book's home page has a sample chapter and a war story that didn't make it into the book. http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/020161586X/mqq-20 http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/

There's no doubt that it's a very extensive book on software development and a very good one but I personally don't recommend it. If one really wants to know about software development, I find that it's much better to join an open source project and discuss the development of the project with other people than just reading about software development. It's almost the same thing as learning everything about an internal combustion engine but having no idea how to fix one.

In hindsight perhaps I shouldn't have bought the kindle edition of the book (Code Complete) because it's a very large book and it's not those kinds of books where we must read from cover to cover and I don't think it's very practical to read those books in a kindle but perhaps it's just me. Just my 2 cents.

StackOverflow is constructed software. I don't agree with much of Geoff's writings, but I do admire his output.

Second to last paragraph: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/make-your-email-hac...

Most passwords resets do not mail you the password; they usually mail you a unique URL which you can use to reset the password, which often generates a second mail telling you the password was changed.

That prevents anyone from "sneaking" into your account, even if the can snoop your mail / copy your inbox. You'll see the intrusion, and you'll be unable to log into the service after the password is changed.

Storing the password in plain-text in your inbox has none of that protection.

> Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited

There is no DRM on this book, luckily enough.

Although a lot of pathnames match across US-UK, I don't think they've fully harmonised all the IDs or have any efficient way to tell which ones actually match. So apparently they're just playing safe by redirecting to homepage.

I'm not surprised as even those geo-targeted "Continue shopping" messages are fairly recent. I once wrote a Teleporter script to switch between Amazons (http://softwareas.com/domain-teleporter-greasemonkey-script) and if they're redirecting to homepage, it's still useful!

But the offer is there:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Effective-Programming-More-Writing-e...