Introduction

• Construction's critical role in software development
• Technology knowledge vs. principles knowledge
• Dealing with "accidental" and "essential" difficulties

Defensive Programming

• Error processing
• Effective strategies for anticipating change
• Code stepping
• Offensive programming

Creating High Quality Designs

• Differences in design effectiveness
• Attributes of great designers
• The Primary Technical Imperative: Managing Complexity
• Managing technical debt 
• The relationship between naming and design
• Design guidance: Information hiding, abstraction, encapsulation, modularization, cohesion, separation of concerns

High-Quality Routines

• Coding Horror: examples of low-quality routines
• Program layout techniques
• Low-effort, high-payoff commenting techniques
• The Pseudocode Programming Process

High-Quality Classes

• Good and bad reasons to create classes
• Designing interfaces

Code Optimization

• A defensive strategy for code optimization
• Three optimization approaches that don't work
• Example of intensive optimization

Quality Practices

• Debugging by superstition
• A scientific approach to debugging
• Tips for finding defects
• Tips for fixing defects
• Defect cost dynamics
• Error prone modules

Key Principles

• Actively manage essential difficulties
• Keep accidental difficulties from increasing needlessly
• Minimize complexity
• Differentiate between complexity inherent in the problem vs. complexity created by the solution
• Minimize needless variations
• Favor read-time convenience to write-time convenience
• Consider whether you should be programming "into" your language rather than "in" it
• Minimize the lag between error insertion and error detection