I can recommend a Philosophy of Software Design Paperback by John Ousterhout

Haven't read this, but based on looking through the table of contents (so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt), I agree with your choice. You mentioned that you've been programming for awhile, you might have heard of Grady Booch and "Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications." Object oriented techniques has fallen a little out of fashion now, which may be part of the reason why this book isn't as popular, but it was big around 20 years ago. It also discusses on the many topics of your choice: - Complexity, what it is and how to manage it - Encapsulation (Information Hiding). - Interfaces - contracts for your encapsulated code - Abstraction And am certain that Grady Booch's book was itself mostly based on older material. I also really like any really good book on doing requirements (they all have 80% of the same info). Getting the true needs of all your stakeholders (you…

I was about to recommend the same book - lots of good nuggets of wisdom in here, without the dogma you sometimes find in this kind of literature.

His idea to keep interfaces small and powerful bothered me - I don’t think it expresses any truth about programming despite being a good rule of thumb. I kept feeling frustrated while reading. The lambda calculus has the best interface to functionality ratio possible but you don’t see humans using it to program. This objection led me to the conclusion that a better heuristic would be: programs should try to communicate intent primarily to another reader, and then to the computer. He does touch on this a little by saying aim for ease of reading over ease of writing, but I don’t think it was a main point. I agreed with almost everything else he had to say including the “taking it too far” chapter (I don’t actually think we should be using lambda calculus to program lol). Curious to know which parts you disagreed with. I am only 2yoe