[hiAndrewQuinn]

I'm more interested in figuring out what kind of knowledge base most reliably turns a junior dev into a "skilled pragmatist".

My guess is the highest ROI thing one can do in software engineering is take your command line environment and OS internals seriously to heart. This can be either bash/Unix or PowerShell/Windows, depending on your career goals, although having gotten reasonably good with both sets I'd recommend the former. Wherever you go, you'll have that ultra portable knowledge to rely on, and do in 10 lol minutes what might take your coworkers 20 or 30.

[from-nibly]

shaving 20 minutes off a task is useless unless it's something that happens constantly. The real differentiator will be, do you know you can do something, that others in your org think is impossible? Can you turn a 6 month project into a half day script and move on?

Also there isn't "A knowledge base" that turns a junior dev into a "skilled pragmatist". It comes from being a part of delivering value all the way up and down the stack. There unfortunately isn't a book that can really teach you that. You gotta build that in yourself on your own through experience.