Roadmap to a better programmer [closed]

Answer 1

My main piece of advice would be: don't be afraid to rewrite your own code. Look at stuff you wrote even a month ago and you will see flaws and want to rewrite stuff.

Make sure that you understand some fundamentals: collections, equality, hashcodes etc. These are useful across pretty much all modern languages.

Depending on the language you use - use lint and metric tools and run them over your code. Not all their suggestions will be applicable but learning which are important and which are not is important. E.g FindBugs, PMD etc for Java.

Above all refine and keep refining your work. Don't treat your work as abandonware!

Answer 2

Learning a programming language is in many ways similar to learning a spoken language. The only way to get good at it is to do it as often as possible. In other works

Practice, practice, read and then practice more

Answer 3

One you have learned something, try to learn something a little harder. Read and practice a lot about things that seem confusing at first time (lambda functins, threading, array manipulation, etc). It will take its time, but once you have practiced enough, what seemed confusing at first, will be familiar and easy.

Answer 4

There are two kinds of learning - 1. Informal (like how you learned how to function in society- through interaction with peers and family) 2. Formal (like your high school training- through planned instruction)

If you want an entry-level programming job, formal training via an undergrad Computer Science/Engineering degree is the way to go. However, if you want to become a rock-star developer, it is best done by informal training- make unintentional mistakes and have senior developers curse at you, learn a design pattern because an app you are updating uses it, almost cry because a bad developer wrote a huge messy program lacking documentation and best practices and now you have to do several updates to it ASAP; thing of these nature.

It is hard for anyone to give you a list of all you need to know. It varies per area (e.g. a web developer vs. to a desktop developer) and it varies per company (e.g. Microsoft that sells software vs. General Motors that mainly just use it in their cars.) Informal traiing and being engaged in trying to learn to do your job better and get promoted is your best bet in my opinion.

To prove my point, everyone here has great answers but they all differ. Ask a rock-star developer how he learned something or when, why; they may not know- things just happen.

Answer 5

In addition to the rest of the great advice already given here, don't be afraid to read about coding and good practice, but also take everything with a grain of salt and see what works best for you. A lot of advice is opinion.

Good sites to read: -thedailywtf.com -joelonsoftware.com -codinghorror.com -blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing

A great place to get practice is programming competition websites. Those will help you learn how to write good algorithms, not necessarily maintainable code, but they're still a good place to start for learning. The one I used to use (back when I had time) was: http://uva.onlinejudge.org/

Learn more than one language. One at a time, definitely, but ultimately you should be fluent in a couple. This will give you a better perspective I think, and help you to become an expert at programming, rather than being an expert at a certain language.

Learn the ins and outs of computers at all levels, hardware, os, etc. Ideally you should be able to build your own system, install multiple operating systems on it, and diagnose just about every problem that can arise. I know many programmers who are not "computer tech people" and their failure to understand what is happening at every level becomes a major hindrance in diagnosing and fixing unusual bugs or performance issues.

Answer 6

Find a program that intrigues you, one that solves a problem, or one that would simplify many of your tasks. Try to write something similar. You'll get up to speed very quickly and have fun doing it at the same time.