I've read over 100 coding books. Here's what I learned

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[calebprenger]

How do you read a programming book? I find myself doing examples and writing notes and it ends up taking forever so I give up

[avidrucker]

*Video Main Points Overview, Timestamps, & Summary*
1. 0:14 The "perfect" book doesn't exist.
- points of potential (mis)alignment: topic/writing complexity, topic/writing detail, of writer's focuses/goals, intended target audience
2. 1:22 Reading too many books at once can lead to overwhelm.
- Here's a reasonable limit to start with: a maximum of 3 books at the same time
Ad break 1:44
3. 2:57 "Read thoroughly" + "Do code exercises"
- get the code examples to run (if possible), ask yourself "why is the code written that way?", try modifying the code ("Are there more interesting things you could get the code to do if you changed it slightly?")
- try the code exercises, especially exercises that you believe may expand your skills, knowledge, and/or comfort zone (don't just pick the easiest exercises and move on)
4. 4:01 "Pace yourself" + "Set realistic expectations"
5. 4:34 It's important to understand first, memorize second.
- Don't skip topics you don't understand. Instead, do some research or ask for help. It's OK if you forget as long as you take notes and follow the recommendations above.

[StoneColdMagic]

The best advice I’ve even been given about code books was to buy the smallest book you can find on the subject and to buy the biggest book you can find.

The small one gives you the basic overview and nuts and bolts of the language and the big one gives you all the deep dives and details to help further your understanding once you have the basics down.

[maduxdotca]

I am a UX designer not a programmer, but I am glad I found your channel. Your advice on learning is applicable beyond coding.

[uscjake]

I recently went through a lot of old and new books to pass a teaching test for java computer science. I actually think there needs to be a language agnostic book that standardizes the core concepts. So loops has a section where it shows pseudo code and then a few examples in various languages. Then sub-chapters are added for specific languages. What this does is gives the reader a roadmap to understanding that all the languages are related and syntactically similar. If they want to learn a new language, they simply download your sub-chapters for a particular language.

[cooleymike]

I would add the Headfirst books in there as well as a good beginner book.

[hypatia]

The writer always writes for a particular audience. You have to figure out the type of audience you are.

[pygeekrfoo]

This is like that person who gets endless college degrees and never gets an actual job.

[eeemuse]

But if you're a total beginner then you don't have to fully understand everything you read, as you're in the initial exposure stage and that what should be to focus 'exposure'. Just keep reading and things will start to connect the more you read and familiarise yourself with the subject. Sometimes the second read of a book makes a lot of sense specially after your have practiced some examples and run into some issues.

[cbbcbb]

I think that I am one of the few people willing to read a book on a computer programming language. I have watch Barnes and Nobles computer book section shrink more and more every year.
In the Atlanta area, there is a computer store called MicroCenter. They used to have a huge book section. They no longer have it. I was able to upgrade and maintain a career just from reading books I bought from them!

[kauffmann]

I'd recommend the book published by Mannings. The style and the format of the book made you understand the concept clearly and more practical. The 2nd publisher should be O'reilly .

[mandisaw]

Nice video, but honestly, these are good tips on study skills for anything, not just programming. It's kind of sad that they don't really teach students how to build study-skills these days - once you know *how* to learn (or how you learn), you can go about learning anything.

[justo]

How important would you say handwritten notes are? Obviously you have to code on a device (and you're not going to write line after line of code on paper) but there are various studies about the importance of handwriting notes when studying in general. Is it more factual knowledge? And conceptual too? What that line of code means, what does that function achieve?

[FritsvanDoorn]

Where can we find the list with over a hundred books you read? Thank you.

[andreasjanzen]

The 2nd suggestion is a very important one IMHO. Do not collect too many books. Focus on reading the one you have just purchased. I waste a lot of time searching for the next great book that I will never read or just start reading and move on to some other shiny object after working through 20% of the book.

[basicguy]

Haven't bought a coding book for more than 10 years. I haven't found a topic that wasn't covered by a free resource on the internet.

[KaminariGame]

less than 20 sec and he's already at point number 1. that alone is impressive.

[KaoukabiJaouad]

the tragedy in programming is that the guys on the top level of the food chain in programming don't write books, the very talented guys past their time writing code than teaching code, the ideal book in programming should be written for a programming language as an example by the guy who made it, the main guy, and he has to have very good teaching skills, and invest a lot of time writing it, the only book that fit's all those criteria's that i found is Programming Perl by Larry Wall, very in depth it gives all things as it is, and the Perl community was flawless, i remember having thousands of pages printed of all guides on it, sadly it's very rare to find those kind of books nowadays, machine learning as an example is the worst covered topic on books, some of them have expert tag on it, yet inside there is nothing, few code samples without any context

[walterbanjamin]

Can somebody recomend me book to understand OOP and functional programming. I'm newbe in coding (pytjon, 5kyu at codewars) and i noticed that my code is awful. I don't know, how to write a beautiful code :/

[foreverseethe]

It looks like searching for books about coding is like looking for YouTube videos about python.