Life of a Good Programmer
Reading book without practicing is meaningless! You must spend much more time on writing programs than reading the text itself. It is just like learning to drive. To learn driving, you need to drive many times in different situations, roads, cars, etc. To learn programming, you need to program!
Everybody has studied math in school and knows that learning how to solve math problems requires lots of practice. No matter how much they watch and listen to their teachers, without actually sitting down and solving problems, they won’t learn. The same goes for programming.
We can't teach the thinking, but yes we can teach the logic. No one can stop you "To Think". To solve any problem, first you have to understand the problem and then try to think about the possible solutions.
Data structures and algorithms are a programmer’s most important fundamental skills, If you have a control on these two you are through with the programming.
If you want to become a programmer, you have to be aware that true programmers are serious, persevering, thinking and questioning people who
handle all kinds of problems. It is important for them to master quickly all modern or legacy platforms, technologies, libraries, APIs, programming tools, programming languages and development tools necessary for their job and to feel programming as a part of their life.
Good programmers spend an extraordinary amount of time on advancing their engineering skills, on learning new technologies, new programming languages and paradigms, new ways to do their job, new platforms and new development tools every day. They are capable of logical thinking, reasoning on problems and coming up with algorithms for solving them, imagining solutions as a series of steps, modeling the surrounding world using technological means, implementing their ideas as programs or program components, testing their algorithms and programs, seeing issues, foreseeing the exceptional circumstances that can come about and handling them properly, listening to the advice of more experienced people, adapting their applications’ user interface to the user’s needs, adapting their algorithms to the capabilities of the machines and the environment they will be executed on and interacted with.
Good programmers constantly read books, articles or blogs on programming and are interested in new technologies, they constantly enrich their knowledge and constantly improve the way they work and the quality of software they write. Some of them become obsessed to such an extent that they even forget to eat or sleep when confronted with a serious problem or simply inspired by some interesting lecture or presentation. If you have the tendency to get motivated to such an extent to do something (like playing video games incessantly), you can learn programming very quickly by getting into the mindset that programming is the most interesting thing in this world for you, in this period of your life.
Good programmers have one or more computers, an Internet connection and live in constant reach with technologies. They regularly visit websites and blogs related to new technologies, communicate everyday with their colleagues, visit technology lectures, seminars and other events, even if they have no use for them at the moment. They experiment with or research the new means and new ways for making a piece of software or a part of their work. They examine new libraries, learn new languages, try new frameworks and play with new development tools. That way they develop their skills and maintain their level of awareness, competence and professionalism.
True programmers know that they can never master their profession to its full extent, because it constantly changes. They live with the firm belief that they have to learn their entire lives; they enjoy this and it satisfies them. True programmers are curious and questioning people that want to know how everything works – from a simple analog clock to a GPS system, Internet technology, programming languages, operation systems, compilers, computer graphics, games, hardware, artificial intelligence and everything else related to computers and technologies. The more they learn, the more knowledge and skills they crave after. Their life is tied to technologies and they change with them, enjoying the development of computer science, technologies and the software industry.
Everything we tell you about true programmers, we know firsthand. We are convinced that programmer is a profession that requires your full devotion and complete attention, in order to be a really good specialist – experienced, competent, informed, thinking, reasoning, knowing, capable and able to deal with non-standard situations. Anyone who takes up programming "among other things" is fated to being a mediocre programmer. Programming requires complete devotion for years. If you are ready for all of this, continue reading and take into account that the next few months you will spend on this book on programming are just a small start. And then you will learn for years until you turn programming into your profession. Once that happens, you would still learn something every day and compete with technologies, so that you can maintain your level, until one day programming develops your thinking and skills enough, so that you may take up another profession, because few programmers reach retirement, but there are quite a lot of successful people who have begun their careers with programming.