Our parting thought: BE CONSISTENT. If you’re editing code, take a few minutes to look at the code around you and determine its style. If they use spaces around their if clauses, you should too. If their comments have little boxes of stars around them, make your comments have little boxes of stars around them too.
The point of having style guidelines is to have a common vocabulary of coding, so people can concentrate on what you’re saying, rather than on how you’re saying it. We present global style rules here so people know the vocabulary. But local style is also important. If code you add to a a file looks drastically different from the existing code around it, it throws readers out of their rhythm when they go to read it. Try to avoid this.