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Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?

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Re: Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?

#11

Post by rtem179 »

Not fully programming related, but one book that made a massive impact on my abilities as a full stack dev was “Refactoring UI” by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger.

From my experience, a lot of devs who work in a full stack roles are stronger as backend devs but they have some basic understanding of how to build a frontend in one of the popular frameworks, such as React. If we are working with a good designer this is usually enough, but having a simple mental modal for how to make something look good really goes a long way. The way that this book was written gave me a good grasp of this by explaining it in a way similar to how I’d think about software (as opposed to being more vague and abstract, which a lot of design books aimed at designers tend to be).

Re: Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?

#12

Post by ezedv »

For programming, books like "Clean Code" by Robert C. Martin and online courses like Codecademy's interactive lessons have been game-changers. Working on open-source projects and collaborating on platforms like GitHub has also turbocharged my learning. Remember, it's not just about quantity but finding quality resources that resonate with your learning style.

Not programming skills related, but sometimes I read this blog in order to be more up-to-date: https://www.ratherlabs.com/blog

Re: Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?

#16

Post by scrapheap »

alexfromapex wrote: post #6

We have this strange paradigm where we’re expected to do the learning on our own time with our own money. If companies don’t let us learn while working, everything should switch to co-ops.

I'm curious how many people here actually don't get support from their employer for learning skills that are needed? Personally I've never had a problem learning things required by work, at work.

The extra learning that I do outside of work hours is all for me, keeping my skills up to date means that I've got a lot more options available if I need to move jobs.

Re: Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?

#17

Post by solannou »

mcraenich wrote: post #10
solannou wrote: post #7

It depends on what are you vision of the "programming skills" and how you define a "better programmer". There is so much area of expertise to master them all.. You seems to have a certain inclinaison for scientific programming. I suppose it's in this area that you want to have better programming skill. The book that I heard a lot about is the following one (it's on my shelf) : - The Art of Computer Programming, Volum…

I'd add to 97 things every programmer should know, there is also a '97 things every architect should know', which is just as good.

I will definitly have a look on this one. Thanks a lot for sharing

Re: Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?

#19

Post by muzani »

alexfromapex wrote: post #6

We have this strange paradigm where we’re expected to do the learning on our own time with our own money. If companies don’t let us learn while working, everything should switch to co-ops.

In my experience, yes, that's the main perk of a salaried job. When I was freelancing, it definitely was on our own money. But most companies have a self-training budget, a training budget, and they allocate time off projects to send you to training. It's more common than dental insurance at least.

Re: Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?

#20

Post by mattmanser »

ezedv wrote: post #12

For programming, books like "Clean Code" by Robert C. Martin and online courses like Codecademy's interactive lessons have been game-changers. Working on open-source projects and collaborating on platforms like GitHub has also turbocharged my learning. Remember, it's not just about quantity but finding quality resources that resonate with your learning style. Not programming skills related, but sometimes I read this…

Clean Code is not an uncontentious book. See:

It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code - https://qntm.org/clean

Long discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27276706

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