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How to be a Programmer
- joejohnson 16y agoWow, that's long.
- ramy_d 16y agoyou're damn right it's long and between all the "how to be a programmer" guides that pop up on HN (all of which are usually 10 point lists that I can only equate to CS masturbation)THIS ONE, this one really long guide here, is worth printing out and reading in it's entirety. the reason it keeps showing up on HN is for new users, like yourself, to read about it. if HN had a "best of the best" based on re submissions and up-votes, this would be on that list (also, erlang).
- nickpinkston 16y agoYea, let's be honest. Most of these "how to X" books should really be condensed into something like this. We should be thankful the author was considerate with our time and wise with his words.
- awa 16y agoYes it looks long, but for what I have been able to read so far (the first couple of chapters) its a worthwhile read. The programmer inside me is afraid that if I don't read it before I sleep I will never be able to find it again!
- pavs 16y agobookmarks are awesome.
- extempore 16y agoIf you lose it you might look on amazon, where you can find this book with four different covers. (!) http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Cp_27%3ARobert%20L.%20Read&field-author=Robert%20L.%20Read&page=1 http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Cp_27...
- 10ren 16y agoIf you upvote it, it appears on your "saved" list: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=awa http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=awa
- afhof 16y agoIs "Michael Tiemann2" the real name or a typo?
- michaelfairley 16y agoIn the HTML version the 2 is superscripted and links to a footnote. Must've been converted to pdf incorrectly.
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- waterlesscloud 16y agoAny Learn To Be A Programmer text that has "Learn to debug" as step one has me won over from the start.
- gruseom 16y agoDebugging is a fascinating experience. On the one hand, it's the Jungian shadow of design, forcing you to look at everything that's wrong and unintended and resistant to conscious control in your work. On the other hand, there's the thrill of the chase. I really started to enjoy debugging when it dawned on me that it always ends in a surprise. That follows trivially from the definition: if you knew what the problem was, you wouldn't be hunting for it. But experientially the surprises are often rather dramatic -- as if there's a built-in Agatha Christie plot generator -- and can be quite enjoyable as long as one's genius ego knows how to take a punch.
- scott_s 16y agoI love that thrill. I've gotten around the ego-punch by making "I can debug anything" part of my ego. With that thought in mind, I just don't give up.
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- pmiller2 16y agoI concur with this thought. For me, the act of debugging is an act of pure problem solving, even more so than the act of programming. Why the hell is this code acting this way rather than the expected way? And what is the right way to fix it? Oftentimes, programming can be (almost) reduced to pasting together libraries and putting a nice UI on the resulting code[1], but debugging is always a fresh experience. [1] Of course, I know this is a total oversimplification.
- gruseom 16y agoYour comment reminds me of another thought I've had, which is that debugging is the part of programming that's closest to empirical science. You're faced with a piece of reality (a running system) and you don't know how it works.
- kunjaan 16y agoI haven't read the book but the table of content looks almost perfect. I wish I had something like this to preserve my sanity when I first entered the industry.
- Groxx 16y agoWhy doesn't the PDF have hyperlinks, but the HTML does? It seems this is an epidemic for PDF versions of text also available as HTML. Is it really so hard to make a PDF that has them? (serious question, actually. I've never tried.)
- scott_s 16y agoIt's trivial if you know how to do it: http://www.tug.org/applications/hyperref/manual.html http://www.tug.org/applications/hyperref/manual.html Include that package in your Latex document, and it automatically makes all section references internal-links. It's great, and too few people use it.
- barrkel 16y ago"Embedding a programming language into a system has an almost erotic fascination to a programmer." That's a classic line, and too true.
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- Yaggo 16y agoHow to be a programmer, step one: if you publish an HTML document, please get your encoding right. (No `Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8` for latin-1 documents.)
- thezarkon 16y agoway to be pedantic. maybe you should read some of those sections about communication.
- syncsynchalt 16y agoAll hail my Alma Mater. -- just another Shootin' Fightin' Dynamitin' Mining Engineer