Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

"This is more of a ‘cultural’ book about programming, in which you won’t get a lot of specific, technical advice on how to program in Python, C or Java. What you’ll get is an introduction to the industry by the people who founded it; people like Brendan Eich, who wrote JavaScript, or Joshua Bloch, who was one of the main contributors to Java. It’s about how those people got into programming and how they think about it. It’s a very conversational book that really helps you to learn the culture of this industry you’re coming into, and some of its terminology. And it’s a much lighter read than Learn Python the Hard Way , of course. It’s extremely important. You’ll be working with people who have been writing code since they were 10 years old. They’ve very much immersed in this world, and as a beginner, it can be intimidating to ask certain things, because it gives away your ‘status’ and the fact that you don’t know as much. To balance that, this book will for example give you a good overview of the history of computer development, what kind of programming languages there are and how they’ve come about—all these things that you wouldn’t necessarily get from online courses and technical books. In spite of my answer to the last question, I still think it’s one of the most welcoming industries that you can get into. I worked hard but I do consider that I had some luck by stumbling into data just as it was getting big, around 2011-2012. None of my friends, be they nurses, doctors, lawyers, actuaries, could have found their job without a lot of advanced studies and official certifications. For all the problems that the computer science industry has, it’s probably one of the most egalitarian, at least on the particular issue of qualifications."