[elg0nz]

" In Richard Feynman’s popular book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” he tells how during his college years he “often liked to play tricks on people”. Most of these tricks were designed to show how dumb people are. For example, in a mechanical drawing class at MIT where the students were taught to use a drawing instrument called a French curve (a curly piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves), Feynman informed the other students that “the French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal”. He reports that the other students in the class were excited by this discovery, and began holding up their French curves and turning them in various ways, trying to verify that the curve was always horizontal at the lowest point. Feynman found this funny, because they had already taken calculus and supposedly learned that the derivative of the minimum of any curve is zero. (Of course, it’s also intuitively obvious: If a curve at a given point is not flat, the point is obviously not the minimum.) Feynman says “I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” www.mathpages.com/home/kmath687/kmath687.htm

"Easy to begin, hard to master" languages/frameworks let you go very far in spite of your knowledge fragility. Some interesting topics to reduce this fragility are data structures, design patterns, software and hardware architecture and, distributed computing.

If I had a penny for every JR. Dev that thinks they can get around the CAP theorem...

[barefootcoder]

Somehow I feel like this comment is meant to be directed toward me (OP), but am struggling to see how it applies to what I was asking. In fact, I specifically asked for resources to assist me in orienting my mind to the web development way of doing things.

Perhaps I've misunderstood and you're actually directing the comment at the hodge-podge of web frameworks that don't seem to follow the principles of design that other languages do?

[elg0nz]

The main point I was trying to get across is that most software is indeed Hacky, not because Computer Science is terrible, but because the people who made it don't have a solid understanding of many fundamentals. They've taught themselves to "program in 21 days" and later have a hard time understanding why things break.

Peter Norvig said it better than I can, becoming a great programmer takes 10+ years. http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Data structures, design patterns, software & hardware architecture and, distributed computing are subjects that all engineers should be familiar with.

For example, the question whether to use NoSQL or SQL is another way of asking if you need to use a Hash or a Binary Tree.

Bad engineers pick one or the other based on Marketing or White Papers, Great Engineers pick the right one based on understanding how their algorithms will use that data and why there are no silver bullets.

[aidenn0]

“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”

This is how we were able to build bridges that didn't fall over before Newton, or even Galileo.