Recommended books for a self taught software developer

2 points by ju_sh 5 years ago · 4 comments · 1 min read

I'm a self taught developer (of 4 years) and have been working professionally as a developer (working mostly with Python and JavaScript) for the past 2 years.

As an autodidact, I feel I'm lacking knowledge in many of the core principles of software engineering and computer science. I often find myself having great ideas for projects, packages and implementations but find myself running into roadblocks and frustration when trying to express them.

Book recommendations appreciated!

not_knuth 5 years ago

Well since you mentioned JS and Python, Programming in Haskell [0] by Graham Hutton is a very approachable text book to familiarize yourself with topics about functional programming (just a personal favourite).

And of course there is the mother of all software books SICP [1] (yes, it's free) – which is often regarded as the CS text book. It is very information-dense and touches on many parts of CS.

However, if you're struggling to build things, I doubt that books will do much good, since they usually cover theoretical aspects. For this I could only recommend lots of tinkering and practice and little half-completed projects, unfortunately.

Do you have some specific examples of projects/libraries where you got stuck? Perhaps we can get a better understanding of what it is you feel you are lacking then...

[0] https://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/pih.html

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html

asicsp 5 years ago

Here's some articles that might help:

* http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/programming/learn-progra...

* https://www.techinasia.com/talk/27-things-started-programmin...

* https://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html

* https://github.com/mtdvio/every-programmer-should-know

Books:

* https://blog.codinghorror.com/recommended-reading-for-develo...

* https://danluu.com/programming-books/

* https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/3253/what-books...