What are some basic c++ programming techniques?

What are the best coding techniques that you follow while programming?

• My team has requested me to take a session on coding, currently I'm looking at Pragmatic programmer,Code complete and Google C++ Style guide.Feel free to share anything that you think nice to talk about and to practice while coding?

• Answer:

  Test driven development. If you know what you're shooting for, get the unit tests out of the way so your code will not start to stray from your original goal, will be well thought out, and, I guarantee, you'll go down far fewer rabbit holes. I only rock this about 60% of the time. When I don't do it, it's out of laziness or attempting to get something hacked out quickly, however I tend to pay for it down the line. Comments. These are absolutely necessary for every method in a non statically typed language (e.g. Python) because you'll forget what the parameters are. Even in a statically typed language it will save you so much time while maintaining what you wrote that it's worth the 2 minute diversion. Don't be clever. Yeah, sometimes it's awesome and fun to do things a neat way (e.g. foregoing a temp variable when swapping values of integers by using xors) but this is the worst thing to do to yourself and your team mates. Often time it's much harder to decipher what is going on and what the original intention was. It's worth it to make your functions 5 lines longer than to have some neat trick that will take you 15 minutes to decode down the line. If it's necessary to do something clever then be gratuitous with comments. Use helpful, explanatory names for variables. I absolutely hate reading through code that have variables entitled, for instance, ret. It's clear that this is the return value because you return it at the end of the function but now I need to read comments or trace the logic to figure out what ret represents. This is compounded if there is any manipulation to the return value before returning.