As a NASA flight software engineer who has created and worked with coding standards for critical software, I would highly recommend Gerard Holzmann's (JPL) Power of 10 Rules [http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/P10.pdf]. This is a set of the 10 most important (and thus highly restrictive) embedded flight software rules. It gets straight to the point and, at only 6 pages, is much easier to apply to actual software development than this ~400 page tome.

EDIT: Another great point referenced in the Power of 10 rules: a requirement is only valuable as long as you can enforce it. With some exception, if you can't enforce it with a static analysis tool or something of the sort, it might not belong in your coding standards.