Code with performance in mind (Score 1)

Many of the good books have already been mentioned in other posts...

One thing to keep in mind: optimize as you go (use common sense). Here are a few examples:

• use arrays over vectors when possible. It's a hell of a lot faster (30x - 40x on some examples).
• sort the array if you're going to reference it a lot (people still believe in searching an array from start to end for some ungodly reason)
• use regex to validate data (why are you parsing the input data manually? -- unless you can prove that it's faster)

A lot of little performance hit eventually adds up to a bigger performance problem. Granted, there will be large performance problem, but sloppy programming should not add to the real problems.