Additional Resources

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Most programming textbooks say a few words about layout and style, but thorough discussions of programming style are rare; discussions of layout are rarer still. The following books talk about layout and programming style:

Kernighan, Brian W. and Rob Pike. The Practice of Programming Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1999. Chapter 1 of this book discusses programming style focusing on C and C++.

Vermeulen, Allan, et al. The Elements of Java Style. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Misfeldt, Trevor, Greg Bumgardner, and Andrew Gray. The Elements of C++ Style. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Kernighan, Brian W., and P. J. Plauger. The Elements of Programming Style, 2d ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1978. This is the classic book on programming style the first in the genre of programming-style books.

For a substantially different approach to readability, take a look at the following book:

Knuth, Donald E. Literate Programming. Cambridge University Press, 2001. This is a collection of papers describing the "literate programming" approach of combining a programming language and a documentation language. Knuth has been writing about the virtues of literate programming for about 20 years, and in spite of his strong claim to the title Best Programmer on the Planet, literate programming isn't catching on. Read some of his code to form your own conclusions about the reason.