[Etheryte]

More than anything else, junior devs need to put in the hours and do the work. You need to make mistakes, figure out how to fix them, and how to go from there. Books are nice, but no book will help you if you're not putting in the hours.

[wy35]

Yeah, I’d recommend reading books for fun first-and-foremost.

I read a bunch of technical and self-help books when I got my first job because I thought it would help my career, and it was AWFUL. I barely used anything I learned. It was so boring.

Now, I read purely for fun. I would say the split is 70% fiction, 20% technical, 10% anything else. Even though I read less technical books, they are immensely more useful because I find them interesting enough to actually apply the concepts.

[tcbasche]

Worst case is a junior who has read all the books but done none of the work so they end up parroting the talking points without being able to back them up or explain why.