I'm interested in learning more about good software design practices and quality assurance. Anything on theoretical advances in proving programs would be appreciated too (math isn't a problem).

I've read code complete, writing secure code, the pragmatic programmer, Professional Software Development: Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, Enhanced Careers (long enough title?), about 4 on extreme programming (blech!) and a few others I've forgotten.

The common problem with all these books I've found is that they lack substance, seeming to focus almost entirely on metaphors and don't provide anything that can be directly applied. What I'm looking for are books with working code, real examples of extremely high-quality projects and their design, not the fluff that is commonly recommended.

I've also found online forums (present forum excluded ;-)) and newsgroups to not be worth the time to sort through all the noise, and rarely even then is there something worth reading.

While I've produced some fairly solid software (at least I think it's solid...), I highly doubt that I'm at, or even that close, to the top of quality development/assurance practices. Can anyone shed some light on the practices that allow software to be used in applications where any failure is simply not acceptable? Thank you for your responses.

In reply to Software Design Resources by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.