Make Me a Programmer

What are the best programming books for beginners? This is a broad question. Programmers need a wide variety of skills, and the field you want to work in can have a significant impact on which ones you need. There isn’t one book, or even a list of books, that will teach you everything you need. Some skills can come from books, and some will only come from on-the-job training. You need books that will improve your knowledge and skills regardless of what type of programming you’re interested in. I’ve put together a list of seven books that will do that for you! These books teach you basic skills that any…

It’s easy to get lost in the sea of programming languages. On top of that, there are some languages (I’m looking at you, JavaScript) that have a vast ecosystem of frameworks. Wikipedia has an exhaustive list of programming languages with several for each letter of the alphabet. I won’t count them, but there are at least 260 at a glance. There’s no way you can learn all of them. So, what languages should every programmer know? Where to Start? If you want to know where to start, you can take a few approaches. Of course, this depends on what you want to do in your programming career. If you want…

As programmers or aspiring programmers, we often focus on the technical skills we need to build software. We work on improving our programming skills, picking up new frameworks, or reading technical books to improve our knowledge of computer science. However, those technical skills will only get us so far. As with most careers, we need to expand our learning and also focus on professional skills. And actually, these skills will make the technical side easier, as we’ll have more clarity on what we need to do to solve problems. In this post, we’ll go over what non-programming skills programmers need to use in our jobs. 1. Communication First and foremost,…

Should developers write documentation? Yes. Yes, they should. That’s it. Everything you need to know! Come back next week for more helpful career advice for aspiring programmers. Oh. You want to know why developers should write documentation? Fine. Why Developers Should Write Documentation Developers should write documentation because it makes it easier for both you and your coworkers to use your code. Well-written code is easy to read and understand. Documented code, on the other hand, is a gift to everyone—even to the coder that created it. Writing documentation makes you a more valuable developer and will help your career. Documenting your code makes you a better developer and helps…

The world of software development has a strange reputation, both for insiders and outsiders. One thing many people have wrong ideas about is how many hours software engineers work, or should work. I’d like to dive a little deeper into this subject: What is the reality and what should you do? What Many People Think Many people think that software engineers work almost all the time. When you ask about average work hours per week, numbers between 60 and 80 hours per week are not an uncommon response. This idea lives among both developers and non-developers. Among some developers, there is also a strong feeling that you can only be…

In this post, we tackle a question that troubles many an aspiring programmer: Do programmers use Mac or PC? The question does have a short, straightforward answer. Here it goes: Some programmers use Mac, while others favor PCs running Microsoft Windows. Still others prefer to use one of the many Linux distributions. Last but not least, some use some combination of the options above. Are you satisfied with this answer? I wouldn’t be. As it often happens, the short answer turns out to be too short. Despite being technically correct, it doesn’t tell the whole story. I bet there are more things you want to know about this Mac vs.…