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A good article, but intimidating, in a way. And I see this quite a bit in terms of budding programmer advice. It boils down to "you need to read this, and the

A good article, but intimidating, in a way. And I see this quite a bit in terms of budding programmer advice. It boils down to "you need to read this, and then read that, and then read this," and then the comments section will have even more suggestions for reading. As I get older, and have kids, I find my ability to sit down and read all of this, and somehow retain it, decreasing. I've recently decided to "get back into" coding (won't go into the history as it isn't tangential to the discussion). I've been having some fun with very, very tiny beginner level programs in Ruby. When I build a list of jobs I would want with Ruby involvement, I find I also need to brush up on my Javascript and learn JQuery. I need to get a full understanding of Git/Github. I should also learn Rails and Sinatra, VIM, and get reacquainted with CSS. On top of that, it really does seem that C is a requirement to really understand what is happening in Ruby. It seems a lot of things that _why_ wrote for Ruby, he wrote in C. Then there is all the additional readings, such as in this article, and comments section. All of which seem incredibly legit, but leave me feeling like I will never actually find the time to write code due to all the reading I don't have time to do. Is there an order of importance with all of this?

stuhacking 16y ago
This article emphasises the important of building your baseline knowledge on the aspects that haven't changed since the dark ages (and probably aren't likely to for a while). As opposed to learning the flavor of the month web framework that might be yesterday's news a week from now. Learning about C and how to use a decent debugger/tracing tool will help you track down exactly where those unhelpful errors are being generated. Learning how to listen in on network traffic will help you find out why the foo you sent is arriving as a bar (or not arriving at all). Learning to use the shell opens up a lot of quick reusable operations and automation possibilities. The books he listed are old, but certainly valuable. I don't think they're going to suddenly go out of date. On the other hand, how much more reading will you do when you have to learn a new high level language every month to keep up with the latest trend? However, I wouldn't let this get in the way of doing what you want to do, which is writing code, I guess. Learn bits and pieces as you need them and I think you will see the benefit. Don't let them weigh you down.

stuhacking 16y ago

This article emphasises the important of building your baseline knowledge on the aspects that haven't changed since the dark ages (and probably aren't likely to for a while). As opposed to learning the flavor of the month web framework that might be yesterday's news a week from now. Learning about C and how to use a decent debugger/tracing tool will help you track down exactly where those unhelpful errors are being generated. Learning how to listen in on network traffic will help you find out why the foo you sent is arriving as a bar (or not arriving at all). Learning to use the shell opens up a lot of quick reusable operations and automation possibilities. The books he listed are old, but certainly valuable. I don't think they're going to suddenly go out of date. On the other hand, how much more reading will you do when you have to learn a new high level language every month to keep up with the latest trend? However, I wouldn't let this get in the way of doing what you want to do, which is writing code, I guess. Learn bits and pieces as you need them and I think you will see the benefit. Don't let them weigh you down.