Last night I was finishing up my slides for the No Fluff Central Iowa Software Symposium, and remembered Blaine mentioning that Code Complete 2 had some good advice re: Performance.
So, I went to local B&N and had a look. I had read the first Code Complete back in College, and man what a great book that was.
Well, from what I read last night Code Complete 2 is even better. I could only focus on the Performance + Tuning chapters last night, but they are a perfect example of pragmatism. McConnell shows so much sense that I bet some people just will not believe that his approaches could possibly work. You know, things like not worrying about performance until the code works… silly stuff like that. 
One of the great things was that he showed more code, and it was updated to be msotly Java, with some C. As I skimmed through the rest of the book, I saw one example where he was showing how comments and poorly constructed code can have a compoundingly bad effect. The method created the trivially simple fibonacci sequence, but did it in such a way that it was impossible to tell without running the code in my head.
Code Complete, along with The Pragmatic Programmer and the new Practices of an Agile Developer are my three favorite books of all time. If you have not had a chance to read any of them yet, you need to.
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