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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

First question is: what books are you reading?

I have a CS degree so I have read the basic texts on Algorithms, Operating Systems, Compilers.

I recently got through the Design Patterns book. I was thinking of picking up either a new language (Go) or start the "Mastering Regular Expressions" book, not sure which.

Have you considered reading some software engineering classics as well?

Code Complete, Rapid Development, The Mythical Man-Month, The Pragmatic Programmer, Peopleware and A Discipline for Software Engineering? (The last one is controversial).

I have read Peopleware. I was thinking about getting The Pragmatic Programmer next. I somehow feel that just reading books without doing anything with the knowledge doesn't work.

The books I enjoyed the most were Richard Stevens' Network Programming and Unix Programming books. Those books teach you a ton of things while helping you implement something useful. They were very hands on. I haven't been able to find anything similar in a long while.

I think we're on different pages. The books I recommended aren't API, framework, language, CS kinds of books. They're books which discuss being a software engineer.

Are they immediately applicable? Sometimes. Are they applicable for the rest of your career? Definitely.

I think that, in most cases, regular expressions will do you more good as a tool than Go will. I have not read Mastering Regular Expressions, but due to their ubiquity, they have probably led to a 5% increase in my productivity as a software engineer. I highly doubt that Go will do that for you except in some very rare cases.

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