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Comment by orsenthil | Hacker News Reader

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orsenthil·

Mine will be none. Only practice, coding, building, testing, exercising again and again has helped me.

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Have you considered trying books filled with structured exercises?

I worked through The Little Lisper when I was at university and I got a lot out of it, for example.

I think this is the kind of content I need. One that presents a problem and allows me to figure out a solution.

Can you recommend any other content like that?

projecteuler.net?

Good question. I guess my answer is not really. I'm not sure why I haven't sought out more of this kind of thing.

Still, a couple of random things I can think of:

The Spatialite Cookbook is no longer maintained, but I think still useful. That's structured as a sequence of fun exercises: http://www.gaia-gis.it/gaia-sins/spatialite-cookbook/index.h...

I also enjoyed Peter Norvig's Design of Computer Programs online course: https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--...

Yeah this is probably correct. Still, on some rare occasions it's so hard to get into a topic that if there's a good book I would give it a try. For example: I'm interested in Ruby internals. The codebase is very very complicated and I have no background in interpreters; in that case Ruby Under a Microscope is a life safer. I would say the same if I was looking to get into Linux kernel development.

But in general - if you are just trying to become a better software developer (e.g write clean, well tested code) you are absolutely right no book will get you there, hard work will.

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