For heaven's sake, just read:

Kernighan, B. W. and Plauger P. J. (1978) The Elements of Programming Style, 2nd edn. McGraw-Hill

They deal with commenting and its pitfalls perfectly adequately.

The definitive SF novel is 'A Case of Conscience' by James Blish (winner of the 1959 Hugo).

The VM Size listed in Activity Monitor is not the size of the swapfiles. I'm running on a machine with 1 GB RAM, my VM size is 6.53 GB, but I only have 128 MB of swapfiles. You might find it interesting to intall MenuMeters http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/ to keep track of what's going on.