A major characteristic of a solid programmer is how they structure and modularize their code. This is not something you can learn from books because it ties str

A major characteristic of a solid programmer is how they structure and modularize their code. This is not something you can learn from books because it ties strongly to the problem at hand. But you can get much better at it by delving into other solid open source code related to the problem. It took them many iterations to get it right, so there's a lot to learn from that. For example, if you want to write an SQL parser/analyzer, take a stab at how you'll structure it, then try extracting this piece from postgresql. Compare and contrast. You'll learn how a good modular code looks like and start learning how to apply such patterns to your code. Delving into a code base without a goal isn't helpful imo. You need to have a main goal like fixing a bug, adding a feature, or extracting a piece to integrate it into your own code.