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in my observation usually indicates a programmer who hasn't sought out better sources.

Those being?



I don't really have an opinion to state on the actual discussion at hand, but I figured I'd toss in an old link which contains what some of "those" might be:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...

Javier Kragen Sitaker's article/mail "My Evolution as a Programmer", recounts one coder's his growth as a programmer, career, and exposure to a variety of books throughout. It's really an excellent read, and contains some comparisons between a few good books - particularly Code Complete and The Pracice of Programming. I quote,

During this time, I read "The Practice of Programming", which is a lot like "Code Complete", but shorter and much higher in quality. I had read the same authors' "The Elements of Programming Style" back in 1995, on much the same subjects, but that book is nearly unreadable today --- it's written in PL/1 and FORTRAN IV. TPoP, aside from being written with modern programming languages, also contains insights from several decades more of the authors' experience.

-- The author in question is Brian Kernighan. Anyrate, I leave any interested person to go check the article out, if you haven't seen it already.


It's a bad sign when Jeff Atwood is your biggest proponent :/


I take solace in the fact that people actually read Code Complete - it's not just a bookshelf ornament. Yes, I know, Knuth is God, and his work is a masterpiece - the point is nobody actually reads the friggin thing.


There are zillions, obviously. What do you want, a list? I don't know, SICP, CLRS, Knuth? Non-mainstream languages? Functional programming? For that matter, a single classic CS paper that wasn't assigned as homework? Code Complete, its grounding in software-engineering literature notwithstanding, isn't very deep.


I consider the lack of depth in Code Complete one of its great strength. You couldn't hand Knuth to a newbie programmer expect them to get anything useful out of it, whereas Code Complete will teach him a lot really useful things he can use his entire career.

If you've been working as a programmer for 12 years it probably won't teach you too many new things, but if you've been working for 12 weeks it is a great book.




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