I second the recommendation for Code Complete. If you're looking for tactical construction advice, better to take it from someone with an established history of having constructed software.
I too would favour Steve McConnell's _Code Complete_ over Jeff's blog-post collection but having read the book when it came out, i.e. not recently, I wasn't too keen overall, perhaps it was McConnell's Microsoft background.
There's no doubt that it's a very extensive book on software development and a very good one but I personally don't recommend it. If one really wants to know about software development, I find that it's much better to join an open source project and discuss the development of the project with other people than just reading about software development. It's almost the same thing as learning everything about an internal combustion engine but having no idea how to fix one.
In hindsight perhaps I shouldn't have bought the kindle edition of the book (Code Complete) because it's a very large book and it's not those kinds of books where we must read from cover to cover and I don't think it's very practical to read those books in a kindle but perhaps it's just me. Just my 2 cents.
I agree with this. As a senior, I followed Jeff's recommendation and bought Code Complete, but I found that a lot of it is becoming mainstream language. A book that thought me more personally is Effective Java, because I think some of its sections go way beyond Java and touch on some serious issues developers deal with, like how you structure and document APIs, when to use some patterns and so on..
