"make it clear before you make it faster"
"make it right before you make it faster"
"keep it simple to make it faster"
From "The Elements of Programming Style" by Kernighan and Plauger
Other than that maybe that naming is one of the hardest and most important things to do.
"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman is another standard.
Martin Fowler and Robert C. Martin are both prolific.
Coding takes practice, so once you've got some ideas on what you want you want your coding to look like add them to your practice and see how it goes.
Quit when you're tired.
When there's something that took you a while to figure out (like what the command line arguments are to get the compiler to produce a link map, say), write it down in a file of such info.