There is a general lack of advanced materials in software engineering. This is one area where market economy works against common good, unfortunately. People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the something for people who already have a bit of knowledge. After that, the number of people who are your potentia…
Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
121–130 of 192 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
#122The obvious “next step” is experiential, i.e., write complicated programs. Books about writing compilers, databases, operating systems, emulators, file systems, etc. are all useful.
Do you have any book recommendations for those topics?
Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
#123I've taken 2 of David Beazley's courses.[1] And, I highly recommend them. If you haven't seen some of his talks, he's very good at explaining things by building them from nothing. I took 2 courses: "Rafting Trip" and "Write a Compiler". Both were awesome. The Rafting Trip took us through implementing the Raft consensus algorithm from scratch. And the "Write a Compiler" course had us build a small language using LLVM.…
In particular, I recently prepped/ran a week-long, in-house training session of Dave's Python-Mastery[1] course at my day job. We had a group of 8 with a mix of junior and senior Software Engineers and while the juniors were generally able to follow along, it really benefited the senior SEs most. It covers the whole language in such depth and detail that you really feel like you've explored every nook and cranny by the time you're done.
[1] https://github.com/dabeaz-course/python-mastery/
(I enjoyed teaching the class so much that I've considered offering my services teaching it on a consulting basis to other orgs. If that interests anyone, feel free to reach out to the email in my profile.)
Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with a $200 book is that it's hard to tell the difference between a book that contains $100k of knowledge and a book that contains $100 of knowledge.
Hey, here is a thought I realised while buying yet another cookbook. If you buy a cookbook and find ONE recipe that you will like and will be using regularly for the rest of your life, that cookbook was already worth it. Even if you found zero recipes, that does not mean you wasted time. Maybe if you think in terms of results for that particular cookbook investment, but it is pretty arbitrary way to look at it. What…
Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
#125The obvious “next step” is experiential, i.e., write complicated programs. Books about writing compilers, databases, operating systems, emulators, file systems, etc. are all useful.
Do you have any book recommendations for those topics?
Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with a $200 book is that it's hard to tell the difference between a book that contains $100k of knowledge and a book that contains $100 of knowledge.
Hey, here is a thought I realised while buying yet another cookbook. If you buy a cookbook and find ONE recipe that you will like and will be using regularly for the rest of your life, that cookbook was already worth it. Even if you found zero recipes, that does not mean you wasted time. Maybe if you think in terms of results for that particular cookbook investment, but it is pretty arbitrary way to look at it. What…
Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
#127There is a general lack of advanced materials in software engineering. This is one area where market economy works against common good, unfortunately. People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the something for people who already have a bit of knowledge. After that, the number of people who are your potentia…
Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
#128There is a general lack of advanced materials in software engineering. This is one area where market economy works against common good, unfortunately. People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the something for people who already have a bit of knowledge. After that, the number of people who are your potentia…
It is not at all unfashionable to pay $50k for a master's degree, however.
Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
#129For learning about performance and low level stuff, Casey Muratori’s Performance Aware Programming course has been great. https://computerenhance.com
For higher level software design stuff (beyond just GoF patterns), check out James Koppel’s writing at https://www.pathsensitive.com/ and his courses at https://mirdin.com
Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?
#130I'm hijacking a bit, but one thing I've been really wanting is some advanced optimization material for C++. There's so much that goes into data locality, branch elimination, faster ways to copy word-aligned data, and so on. I've picked up all I know on the fly, but would love some great resources which go deep into this. Is there something more instructive than Intel manuals? Closest thing I found recently is this: h…
At first he is just showing simple stuff, but stay with it, he goes deep.