【英】专业编程资源

Professional Programming

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. (Abraham Lincoln)

A collection of full-stack resources for programmers.

The goal of this page is to make you a more proficient developer. You’ll find only resources that I’ve found truly inspiring, or that have become timeless classics.

This page is not meant to be comprehensive. I am trying to keep it light and not too overwhelming. The selection of articles is opinionated.

Contributing to this list

Feel free to open a PR to contribute! I will not be adding everything: as stated above, I am trying to keep the list concise.

Must read books

I’ve found these books incredibly inspiring:

There are some free books available, including:

Must-read articles

Other general material and list of resources

Courses

Topics

Algorithm and data structures

Let’s be honest: algo can be a pretty dry topic. This quora question lists some funnier learning alternative, including:

Attitude, habits, mindset

Automation

Biases

Biases don’t only apply to hiring. For instance, the fundamental attribution bias also applies when criticizing somebody’s code written a long time ago, in a totally different context.

Career growth

Characters sets

Coding & code quality

Computer science

Databases

Data science

Debugging

Design (visual, UX, UI)

I highly recommend reading The Non-Designer’s Design Book. This is a pretty short book that will give you some very actionable design advices.

Design (OO modeling, architecture, patterns, anti-patterns, etc.)

Here’s a list of good books:

Articles:

I maintain a list of antipatterns on another repo. This is a highly recommended read.

Quotes:

“You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.”, Frank Lloyd Wright

Design: simplicity

Simple Made Easy ?, Rich Hickey. This is an incredibly inspiring talk redefining simplicity, ease and complexity, and showing that solutions that look easy may actually harm your design.

Dev environment & tools

Tools

Diversity & inclusion

Checkout my list of management resources.

Documentation

Dotfiles

Articles

Editors & IDE

Engineering management

Checkout my list of management resources.

Exercises

The best way to learn is to learn by doing.

Incident response (alerting, outages, firefighting)

Internet

Interviewing

Note: this is about you as an interviewee, not as an interviewer. To check out my list of resources for interviewers, go to my engineering-management repository.

Learning

Learn how to learn!

Richard Feynman’s Learning Strategy:

Step 1: Continually ask “Why?”
Step 2: When you learn something, learn it to where you can explain it to a child.
Step 3: Instead of arbitrarily memorizing things, look for the explanation that makes it obvious.

Problem solving

Project management

See Project management section on my engineering-management list of resources.

Programming languages

I would recommend learning:

JavaScript and may be one other interpreted language (Python, Ruby, etc.). Interpreted languages are useful for quick one-off automation scripts, and fastest to write for interviews.
A compiled language (Java, C, C++…).
A more recent language to see where the industry is going (as of writing, Go, Swift, Rust, Elixir…).
A language that has first-class support for functional programming (Haskell, Scala, Clojure…).

A bit more reading:

Python

For Python feel free to checkout my professional Python education repository.

JavaScript

JavaScript is such a pervasive language that it’s almost required learning.

FP vs. OOP

Over-engineering

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

John Gall, General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail…, 1975 (this quote is sometime referred as “Galls’ law”)

“Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other programmers.”

Rob Pike, Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering

Reading

Papers we love: papers from the computer science community to read and discuss. Can be a good source of inspiration of solving your design problems.
The morning paper: one CS research paper explained every morning.

Releasing & deploying

Security

Shell

System architecture

Scalability

I already mentioned the book Scalability rules above, but there’s also a presentation about it.

Stability

I already mentioned the book Release it! above. There’s also a presentation from the author.