[riskable]

I think this article is interesting but it's really only skirting around the edges of the topic of "learning programming" or patterns or a new language or whatever. A good programming book is written from a an understanding of what programming is: Puzzle solving.

A lot of people think programming is a creative work--and it is to some extent--but if you've ever looked at a block of code and thought to yourself, "this could be written better"--you should realize that, "coding better" is really an exploratory action. You won't know if it's better until you actually run it or someone else reads it and agrees that it is easier to read, makes more sense, etc.

Writing software is fundamentally an act of discovery. If anything has proven this it's the recent Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. Yes, we're 99% sure how our code will perform while in operation but we can never be absolutely 100% certain. Because the CPU, the memory, the chipsets, and other hardware are really just exceptionally reliable laboratory equipment and our experiments (software) have been shown to work precisely as expected almost all the time.

A good programming book will provide plenty of code examples but when it comes time for the reader to practice what they've learned a truly great book will provide the reader with puzzles to solve.