[dschiptsov]

It is a common misconception that to be programmer one should read lots of books. It is as wrong as to say that in order to learn to swim or ride a bicycle one should read books instead of trying.

Only code by the very best people (Abelson & Sussman, Norvig, PG, Armstrong, Marlow, Odersky) is worth reading. Common crap found on blogs (especially about Haskell or Lisp) or github (especially PHP and Ruby code) does only damage by giving a very wrong impression of what programming is really.

There is a good hint: read the standard library of "extraordinary" programming languages - Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, Erlang, Scala and, sigh.. Clojure)

But the very same law holds for any art, be it poetry or music composition, or fiction - 95% is just stuff, a mediocre crap.

btw, ''The Mythical Man-Month'' has no code in it.) And the first two chapters of ''The Programmers Stone'' (which are the only worth reading) has no code in it also.

[yeahbutbut]

There is some value in being able to read non-expert code, you're more likely to run into non-expert code during your day to day job. Someone like Abelson, or Armstrong, will write clearer almost effortless code. Someone at work may spend a thousand lines trying to munge an associative array out of a database result. You have to be able to read both.