I think he is right on most stuff. I don't really like curly braces on their own line though, kinda separates the code too much unnecessarily.
But it's also harder to stay below the 80 cols on such a verbose language as java, I sometimes feel it's better to just ignore it and place everything in a single line (if it's greater than around 110 charecters then you really need to split it or refactor something).
In C at least it's idiomatic to place qualifiers and return types in their own line, leaving more space for the rest of the function signature, or you could code in a less noisy language like Haskell too.
I feel K&R is an important classic from which one can still take a lot of valuable jewels in a pretty concise way. If possible, complement it with other books like Peter van der Linden's Expert C programming (although I don't like his opposition to static linking).
If possible, check the suckless.org projects, they tend to have pretty idiomatic and clean source codes.