In the Elements of Style, William Strunk describes one of his pricinples of composition Omit needless words by saying

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

These words resonate with me; I hold a similar view about how software should be written and as I read this book a number of its rules & principles seem to apply equally to writing good software. This makes sense since the majority^ of code we write is in English. It seems to me that every developer who aspires to be their best would do well to aquire this guide; so, I’ve added this book to my list of books every software developer should own.

^I recently discovered that most of SAP’s code is written in German.