This is a book that I wish was on my son's required reading list.  Not that his code is hard to read (for someone in their first programming class), but that there are all kinds of bad habits that wouldn't need to be broken if he and his classmates spent some time learning what good code looks like before they started to write their own.



The Art of Readable Code from O'Reilly is a quick, easy read with a lot of useful ideas for new programmers.  It weighs in at 180 pages, but there's a lot of well used whitespace and a number of (mostly on topic) comic panels in those pages making it seem shorter.



Part one covers naming, code layout, and writing comments; parts two and three cover the meat of refactoring; and part four discusses testing and gives an example of applying the ideas in the book to a small coding project.



The book's examples are in C++, Python, Java, and Javascript.  I would have appreciated seeing some examples in other languages as well (haskell or scala might be good candidates), especially where that language might obviate or change the advice given.



Truth in advertising note, O'Reilly sent me a free copy of this book to review.