| How to be a Programmer by Robert L. Read (and expanded by the community) https://github.com/braydie/HowToBeAProgrammer It is a collection of short essays on particular skills that are applicable to programmers of different levels. The introduction starts with: > To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one's coworkers and customers. Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence and skill. But it is really child's play compared to everything else that a good programmer must do to make a software system that succeeds for both the customer and myriad colleagues for whom he or she is partially responsible. In this essay I attempt to summarize as concisely as possible those things that I wish someone had explained to me when I was twenty-one. I will also point out that "How to debug" is the first thing in the list. It starts out with: > Debugging is the cornerstone of being a programmer. The first meaning of the verb "debug" is to remove errors, but the meaning that really matters is to see into the execution of a program by examining it. A programmer that cannot debug effectively is blind. > Idealists, those who think design, analysis, complexity theory, and the like are more fundamental than debugging, are not working programmers. The working programmer does not live in an ideal world. Even if you are perfect, you are surrounded by and must interact with code written by major software companies, organizations like GNU, and your colleagues. Most of this code is imperfect and imperfectly documented. Without the ability to gain visibility into the execution of this code, the slightest bump will throw you permanently. Often this visibility can be gained only by experimentation: that is, debugging. |