You could do A LOT worse than reading at least 50 of the 1000+ papers Joel Spolsky has written.
If anything at least read these:
* Things You Should Never Do, Part I
* The Iceberg Secret, Revealed
* Fire And Motion
* The Law of Leaky Abstractions
* The Development Abstraction Layer
“When you’re listening to her on your iPod, there’s a huge infrastructure that makes that possible, but the very best thing that infrastructure can do is disappear completely. Provide a leakproof abstraction that Dolly Parton is singing, privately, to us.”