This chapter is somewhat subjective. Many of the things we think are good you or your personal expert friend might think are bad, craptastic, moronic, useless, or any number of other things. Writing code is a little like writing English: there are a series of things that many people agree are "good practices", there are a series of things that some people agree are good, and there are a series of things that everyone argues about and are the subject of ideological discussions, witch-hunting, and flames.
Even so, developing good coding practices helps the following:
reduces bugs
reduces the amount of time it takes to fix bugs
reduces the amount of time it takes for other people to figure out what you're doing
reduces the amount of time it takes for you to figure out what you did
All of these are good things.
This chapter tries to cover things that many "educated" and/or "wise" programmers consider to be "good practices". Additionally, it contains some things that are good practices that are probably only good in the context of muds and/or LPC.
In general, if you don't know what you're doing, it's a good idea to read through this and follow the advice herein. If you think you know what you're doing, it's a good idea to read through this and think about the advice herein and adopt what you think works for you and your mud.
Whatever you do, don't get into an argument with someone and say, "This is _the_ only way to do it and it says so here!" and point to this manual.