Probably the book that surprised me the most, was "Designing Active Server Pages" by Scott Mitchell[1] - bought for next to nothing in a sale clearing out old titles. I don't really program in VBscript or on the .net platform - but the book demonstrates how much improvement it is possible to get in a server-side template language (eg: like PHP, ColdFusion) with a bit of mindfulness to how code is structured.
I'm not sure I would recommend it today, but at the time I read it, in the mid 2000s, it did change my view on these "unmaintainable" technology stacks. I later came across the fusebox architecture/pattern, originally from ColdFusion - and realized that many PHP programmers had skipped some history, ending up reinventing code structure, sometimes badly.
Note that fusebox has grown and changed, I'm mostly talking about the fundamental ideas, and I don't think the later "port" to using XML was a very elegant or good idea. For those interested, see:
I'm not sure I would recommend it today, but at the time I read it, in the mid 2000s, it did change my view on these "unmaintainable" technology stacks. I later came across the fusebox architecture/pattern, originally from ColdFusion - and realized that many PHP programmers had skipped some history, ending up reinventing code structure, sometimes badly.
Note that fusebox has grown and changed, I'm mostly talking about the fundamental ideas, and I don't think the later "port" to using XML was a very elegant or good idea. For those interested, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusebox_(programming)#Fusebox_... and most of the rest of that page.
[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000448.do