Kernighan & Plauger
The Elements of Programming Style
2nd Edition

(There are much much more wisdom and great words in this book
than I collected here. These are just some examples.)


As we have said several times, the hard part of programming is
controlling complexity -- keeping the pieces decoupled so they can
be dealt with separately instead of all at once. And the need to
separate into pieces is not some academically interesting point,
but a practical necessity, to keep things from interacting with
each other in unexpected ways. (p. 95)


The best documentation for a computer program is a clean
structure. (p. 141)


And when a program cannot speak for itself, it is seldom the case
that greater realiability or understanding will result by
interposing yet another insulting layer of documentation between
the code and reader. (p. 151)