Read Clean Code by Robert Martin. It is a MUST for all programmers.

is it about programming universally or just a few specific languages

It is mostly about Java, but the principles cover basically anything.

I don't think it's something you should read until you have decided that you want to become a master; it doesn't teach you how to write code, just how to write code that doesn't suck.

ahh. I will keep it in mind for sure.

Refactoring by Martin Fowler

Yes true, but if the OP is going to have a career in the software industry, he/she should work on his craftsmanship.

I care a lot about how stuff I make looks.

No doubt if I need to work on it I will check out these books at a point when I am comfortable with all the stuff they contain.

The classes I will be in for the next year or so probably won't delve too far into the hardcore bits of programming, things I heard about from people here like structural flow and stuff.

At least I don't think. Maybe they will go over some actual programming specific stuff in cs2250....but who knows.

My midterm is today. I looked at the one he assigned his students last semester, it wasn't that bad. Just have to be careful because my professor is a bit whimsical in the way he grades (lowers/raises your scores randomly if he changes his mind/you argue a case)

This post was edited by Eep on Jul 16 2012 03:22am

At least delve into the industry practices. And by industry practices you'll want to look into the best practices and "gotchas".

from the book you mentioned? Or just in general.

I would really like to learn some stuff about that 'flow' irimi or whoever was talking about. Or anything else programming specific but not language specific. Need a resource for that.

Control flow is nothing more than understanding how a program is executed. It isn't something you learn by reading books or anything - but rather simply by coding and debugging a lot. In a single-threaded program, control flow is fairly trivial to understand - you read the code, parse the loops and conditionals, and figure out exactly what the computer is doing as it's executing the program. The "control" is at the point just what methods/lines are being run at any given point in a program.

More broadly speaking, control flow is just another word to describe where the program is going and how. The more solid an understanding you have of control flow, the quicker/easier you'll be able to glance at a large block of code and describe what it does without going through the program line by line. More importantly, it will enable you to write programs that are cleaner and more straightforward in terms of how they can achieve a certain task.

This post was edited by irimi on Jul 17 2012 02:43pm