I read through Code Complete 2 cover to cover my first year and I agree with parent it's more useful early on than later. There's a lot of discussion around best practices; I think there's an entire chapter on strategic whitespace. All the stuff in there makes sense, but it cements why it's important.

Definitely check out "The Pragmatic Programmer"! There's definitely some good nuggets in there that helped me. Distinguishing full-blown prototypes vs. prototypical kernels that can be productionized, a.k.a. tracer bullet prototyping, is one.