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Comment by blinduck | Hacker News Reader

Completely anecdotal, YMMV.

I've found I don't really level up by reading books or tutorials.

I level up when I actually do a project by myself from start to end. For the projects I do, there tend to be parts I know and parts I don't, so I still Google for the relevant bits and pieces that I don't understand.

So I guess keep working on projects that have parts you don't understand. There also need to be parts that you do understand, so that you don't feel like you're jumping in at the deep end.

On a side note, I'm not knocking reading books. They help me become aware of certain ideas, but I don't learn them completely until I've implemented it myself.

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I agree - I've read a ton of books, but usually only take small nuggets of knowledge from them and end up having to reread them every few years. Instead, most of what I know about programming I gained by doing. Writing a lot of code levels you up, not reading about writing code.

I find reading books, articles, tutorials is a great way of finding out what you don't know and what you might want to try tinkering with next to level up, because otherwise you just use the same techniques over and over, but to actually level up you need to get down and dirty and write a lot of code.

I used to get little value out of books, then I started reading better books. Check out this Amazon list for some high quality books. Don't let the "Clojure" theme scare you, these will make you a better programmer in any language.

http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH

Don't let the "Clojure" theme scare you

Actually, I use Clojure quite a bit, so that won't scare me at all!

I've already got Programming Clojure (and The Joy of Clojure - not on the list), Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs and Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming. Purely Functional Data Structures and How to Solve it have been on my list for a long time too. Some other books that I haven't heard of before on that list look very interesting though!

I didn't really mean that I don't get value from books - I do - just that I find books to be only the first stage of learning and most useful in telling me what it is I don't know, which I then can study and try for myself and its the experimentation and tinkering that actually makes it sink in.

Niels Henrik Abel, when asked how he so quickly became proficient in mathematics said that he accomplished it "by studying the masters, not their pupils." I've learned languages by reading the writings of the author(s) of a language. Reading books is good, reading papers is even better. I didn't have a good foundational understanding of Lisp until I read McCarthy's paper on it.

I second the practical approach of working on projects. I've learned so much just by trying to do things I wanted to do, but didn't know how to do at the time.

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