10 Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code

Gerard Holzmann's Ten Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code specifies rules for developing safety critical code in C, rules that improve software reliability and testability. More detailed descriptions can be found in the June 2006 Issue of IEEE Computer, which can be found here. For me, there are other programming languages out there who may be better suited for safety-critical (and real-time) systems, languages like Ada or Erlang. I believe that one important aspect of such systems is to make sure that the routines invoked will take a deterministic amount of time to complete.

Visualizing Sorting Algorithms

Here is a website where you can view animations of different sorting algorithms that shows you how they operate, how the preconditions affect the performance of the algorithms, and which one performs better than the other under certain conditions and input sizes. You can also view the source code behind each algorithm. If you are looking for other 'animations', you can find them here, here, here, and here.

Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

SANS Institute came out with a top 25 most dangerous programming errors, errors which can lead to serious security breaches.

"... experts from more than 30 US and international cyber security organizations jointly released the consensus list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors that lead to security bugs and that enable cyber espionage and cyber crime. Shockingly, most of these errors are not well understood by programmers; their avoidance is not widely taught by computer science programs; and their presence is frequently not tested by organizations developing software for sale."