It seems like you have a grasp of what is wrong already. Stuff you can do right now without reading a book - Use source control - Enact a policy where all new

It seems like you have a grasp of what is wrong already. Stuff you can do right now without reading a book - Use source control - Enact a policy where all new code is to be well tested (which you can enforce with some build/checkin system) - Make a refactoring change to isolate sections of code that minimally touch other sections and separate them into projects As for books, I would suggest looking at Head First Design Patterns by Freeman and Robson. This isn't explicitly about project design, but it is about designing reusable code modules which can really help in any language. It is aimed toward object-oriented languages, (the examples are in Java) but it has helped organize my code in other languages as well. If you're using the OO facilities of Matlab, VB and python this can be useful.