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by bellweather49 2741 days ago
While I was in general agreement with the article, I think the examples are extreme; the author has swung from wanting to learn every Java GUI framework to reading books about softtware design. There is a middle ground, which is what I was expecting the author to describe. Here is my (utterly incomplete and non-comprehensive) list of books to read:

- The C Programming Language - Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice - The Art of Unix Programming - An Introduction to Beginning Linux Programming - Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 24 Hours - The Python Data Science Handbook - Python Programming with OpenCV - Speaking Javascript - Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS

Wade through that lot and you will have learned about C, UNIX/Linux, networking, HTML CSS, Javascript, data science/machine learning, text processing, and computer vision. I reckon that covers 90% of what gets posted on here.

While some of this seems quite specific, all of these books teach either principles such as machine learning, or teach actual standards such as POSIX, HTML etc. None of these are going out of fashion anytime soon, unlike the latest GUI framework or virtual DOM library.

The last book in my list actually speaks to the broader issue of framework use. The core takeaway of the book can be summarised as this: HTML is a tree data structure, and clean CSS relies on namespacing CSS rules so that they only apply to a specific branch of the tree, so no `.menu` classes or the like, which will probably end up applying to all sorts of branches. I think if every front-end dev understood this, libraries like React would have had far less appeal, as everyone would have been too busy writing lean, fast HTMl and CSS sites to have the time to learn how to make complicated React-powered static blogs with loading spinners. (As an aside, I think there would have been less of a backlash with motherfuckingwebsites and brutalist design, as only a little CSS can make a site much more usable, with almost no impact on load time, but I think people have been scared off it by bad experiences).