Towards the beginning of my career, I consumed a lot of content on writing maintainable code, career tips and object orientated programming. Some of the resources I have even revisited. This list contains the ones worth recommending.
Assumed Knowledge
To get the most out of these resources you should be comfortable with at least one object orientated programming language and be interested in a career developing software.
If you feel you need to brush up on some of your Java skills for some of the resources I would recommend Learn Java with these Resources, which are the resources I used and recommend.
Resources
The following resources can be consumed at any time and in any order.
Clean Code - Bob Martin
One of the classics, this book gets you thinking in the right direction when it comes to designing software that is reusable, maintainable, flexible and scalable. I found the explanation of TDD to be particularly useful.
- Type: Book
- Length: ~250 pages
- Language: Java
- Note: I skipped chapters >= 16
- My key take-aways:
- later = never
- comments tend to a lie after a while
- unit tests make our code more flexible
- write dirty code and then clean in
Clean Code Video Series - Bob Martin
After reading Clean Code I can highly recommend watching the video series to make the lessons more concrete, especially the videos on TDD.
- Type: Video
- Length: ~1 hour per video with 10+ videos
- Language: Java
- Note: I skipped the astronomy segments at the beginning of each lesson and the episodes on architecture and BDD.
Clean Coder - Bob Martin
This book gives you a great insight into the Bob Martin’s professional life as a software engineer and is a fun book to read. Full of handy tips for a career in software development.
- Type: Book
- Length: 210 pages
97 things every programmer should know
I enjoyed reading this book and although I didn’t I agree with all of the tips, some of them were really useful. You could read this book over 97 days and it wouldn’t be a problem.
- Type: Video
- Length: 258 pages
- Favourite tips:
- The boy scout rule
- Fulfil your ambitions with open source
- Hard work does not pay off
- Keep the build clean
- Learn foreign languages
- Make the invisible more visible
- Pair program and feel the flow
- Reinvent the wheel often
Head First Design Patterns - E. Freeman et al.
This is a great book for learning about design patterns, design principles and object orientated programming. I wrote my own examples on GitHub to help me consolidate the material.
- Type: Book
- Length: 638 pages
- Language: Java
