40hz said the most important thing, imho, and where i often fail, to my deteriment:
My only suggestion is that whatever coding conventions you adopt, you use them consistently.
Particularly when it comes to variable and function naming -- pick a convention and stick with it.
I suppose when it comes to style choices, my view is to always aim for clarity and avoid cleverness.
Cleverness always ends up meaning "hard to maintain" in the long run.
Most things are clearer in 3 lines of code than crammed into 1 line. Choose the 3 line way.
In a similar vein, don't be afraid of nice long variable names and function names.. I personally have no problem with names made up of whole long phrases.
And my #1 suggestion to new coders: Look for places where you repeat yourself.. When you find such an occurrence, that's your signal that you need to restructure your code and use a function or object. Avoid repetition of code and you are half way there.
If you want to try to meditate on good coding -- from my stand point it all boils down to writing code so that it's easy to MAINTAIN (modify, extend, etc.). You should always be organizing code so that it would be easy to change how something works. The more likely you are going to actually need to change something, the more you need to modularize your code around that component to make it easier to replace that piece of code.
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