Others have already listed good books. That's great, except I'd suggest spending time looking at data structures and algorithms books as well as software engine

Others have already listed good books. That's great, except I'd suggest spending time looking at data structures and algorithms books as well as software engineering and design books: a right data structure or algorithm can mean less code. However, I'll suggest something others only touched upon. You already know more programming paradigms than most working programmers including those that have contributed to software you use daily. That's great and invaluable. Each of these paradigms told you something new about managing complexity (message passing in Squeak, reflection in Java, metalinguistic abstraction in Lisp). You can now apply them outside of those languages (that's what Design Patterns are about): multiple dispatch via Visitor Pattern in Java, message passing OO in Lisp[1], interfaces and implementations in C and so on. [1] http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/oop-in-fp.txt http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/oop-in-fp.txt What you don't have is practice applying these lessons iteratively: put in effort, ship something (even with inadvertent mistakes), receive constructive criticism, find bugs and missing features, put in effort to improve design as needed to add features and fix bugs, ship an improved version and so on. You're afraid of shipping something you're embarrassed of, or of failing to ship something that delivers on its promises. Every programmer feels that, it's perfectly natural and fine: its what motivates us to improve. Acknowledge this fear, but don't let it paralyze you. There's a Russian proverb: eyes fear, hands do. Apply it.