general

The subtitle of McConnell's book is "A Practical Handbook of Software Construction". I have found that it lives up to this claim excellently. Like Brook's classic "The Mythical Man-Month" Code Complete offers practical advice on the real-world challenges of software development. Code Complete contains 33 chapters, which can be read as separate essays.

To entry-level programmers and computer science students, this book is an excellent primer on the fundamentals of the industry. For experienced programmers, this book is an great way to review your own development strategies and best practices. For project managers, Code Complete serves as a great source of ideas for process improvement, as well as a great learning tool to pass on to new entry-level hires. My employer has used several chapters out of Code Complete as the basis for discussion topics.

McConnell writes in an easy-to-read, entertaining style that has made him one of the most popular authors in the field. His book "Rapid Development", is also an extremely popular book on software development, and many (including me) are anxiously awaiting his next work, "Software Project Survivial Guide".

In short, Code Complete belongs in the library of every serious developer

Every serious programmer, or at least the one who wants to become one should read this book.

Book is supported with structured programming examples (Ada,C,Pascal), but the underlying principles that it is trying to present are as contemoporary as always.

I started my career as a programmer. As a novice I got to work on some (other people's) pretty crappy code that kept me up very long at night, and costed me a great deal of stress. Learning from that frustrating experience I asked myself - what is a good programming, and what would it take to learn how to be a great programmer/developer.
I discovered Steve McConnel's book, and it helped me a lot in getting there. It remained one of the milestones of my career.

This book will teach you a lot. It will show you a bad way to code, and the good way to do it. It will give you a great coding tips, and it will show you some, as the author calls them, "coding horrors". Moreover, it will tell you some great 80/20 rules that should help you with debugging, testing and refactoring focus.
It will definitely change you as a programmer - a lot. Do I need to say again that every serious programmer should read this book.

The only thing that I could wish for would be a reflection on
Object-Oriented programming and its good vs. bad practices.

The book Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt and Thomas fell to the second spot on my most-frequent "read list" since receiving this new version of Code Complete, though they both serve slightly different goals with overlap.
CC2 is a great one-stop 'place' to go to when you want a great excuse to apply Stephen Covey's 'Sharpen The Saw' principle. This updated version has some great, fun to read and expert instruction on designing from scratch, whether it's OO, writing better routines, psuedocode, nested loops, or at the higher level: agile methods, etc..
His approach of talking to you, the programmer, is ideal: not too much humor, and an easy to read, but professional approach in the way he donates the contents of his brain: i.e. McConnell's lengthy experience in the field.
I read just a couple of paragraphs in a chapter before work one morning, and the advice I picked up saved so much time that same day. And it wasn't even specific to coding instruction. It was a piece of advice on a philosophy on how he personally determines how much upfront design he should settle on before coding.

Books like these are a little hard to muster up motivation once you first buy it and get the book on your shelf. Our motivation to do something comes from the picture in our head, or how something sounds, and at first you can't see how much good it will do to start spending precious time on it, as compared to some brand new book on a specific language that looks impressive to know.
But the truth is: refreshing your overall S/W construction techniques gives you so much more of your life back, because you will have way less bugs and a lot more fun maintaining the high-quality code you are now writing because of CC2.

I mentioned already that he covers OO, but I wanted to emphasize the excellent material he offers in this area. I am now seeing the benefit of measuring the quality of your classes by this guideline: are they true Abstract Data Types. ( rather than just trying to use the syntax that the language provides to its potential).
Great job on a pretty thorough re-write of a S/W development staple.