Speaking of books, today I accidentally found an interesting book named "Developing Games In Java".
Covers quite a lot of topics, see: http://www.booksmatter.com/b1592730051.htm.

I ordered it today from Amazon for 32$. Anyone else has bought the book?

The TOC really looks promising.

Somebody here read it?

Okay..  this is a religious question... realizing that, here's MY religion...

I am NOT a big believer in "methodologies."  I've been coding a long time and seen a lot of methodologies coem and go.  Mostly what they introduce are new buzz words for managers to talk about and people with no  real experience to put on their resumes.

Coding is as much art as science and elegence is something you know "by feel' as much as anything else.

Having said that, I'll add this:

The two most important classes I had in college were Data Structures and machine Organization.  Data Structures and structured programming taught me how to think of my code as functional units.  Those lessons are as applicable in OOPLs today as they ever were.  (An object == a Data Stucture at the end of the day.)

Machine Organization changed  my understanding of the computer.  Rather then being a magic black box into which I fed incatations and out of which came results, i learned exactly how the machien works from the gates on up.  Among other things, a good Machine Organization class will break you of any temptation to ever write monoloithic code again.

FOr machien organization I rcommend Tannenbaum's book.  Its a classic and still applies.  For data structure there are lots of good boosk out there, just make sure its a book tha teaches data structure theory and not just a catalog of pre-implemented structures.

'Writing Solid Code' by Steve Maguire, published by Microsoft. ISBN 1-55615-551-4

Its C-centric, but a lot of useful tips & anecdotes about writing, err well, solid code  

Its more to do with avoiding bugs, both code wise & design wise. It was given to every programmer at the last place I worked, though sadly not all of them read it.

- Dom