Even these seemingly non-controversial pieces of advice turn out to have controversy attached to them.

“Name your variables correctly,” for example, is that every experienced programmer will agree upon. What constitutes “correctly” however, is fuel for raging knock-down, drag-outs in coding groups. Let’s presume OOP programming and you have a class for a bank account. Obviously it will have a balance. (Ignore the poor modeling for pedagogic purposes. Real bank accounts can have multiple balances…) What should that balance variable be named, assuming the containing class is called BankAccount?:

• balance
• m_balance
• fpBalance — the fp means fixed point
• m_fpBalance
• _balance
• account_balance
• accountBalance
• AccountBalance
• m_AccountBalance
• fpAccountBalance
• _AccountBalance
• _fpAccountBalance
• accBalance
• m_accBalance
• … and a cast of hundreds more.

I have seen some variant of each of the examples provided and dozens more used in real-world code. I have watched programmers red/purple-faced and shouting at each other over which is right. (Programmers seem to have a problem with comprehending “perspective”.)

Now lather, rinse, repeat for each and every other nugget of advice out there.

And keep in mind, again, that this is screaming matches over trivial differences in agreed-upon principles. When you mix in things where even the principle isn’t agreed upon (“what is the right level of abstraction?”, say) … let’s just say that things get really ugly unless you’ve got management ready to stomp, hard, on the resulting interactions.

Any book you read on the topic, as a result, will be just as controversial as Uncle Bobs’s Clean Code or Joe-Bob’s Rifle Range and Really Good Code Structuring or whatever.

So my advice is … don’t look for any particular book. Pick up a book—it sounds like you already have one—and read it and make notes of what you do and do not agree with. Then read code. Lots of it. See where it follows and doesn’t follow what your book said. See if you can figure out why. Then see if you agree with the other approach more than, say, Maisie-Sue’s Coding and Crocheting.