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Do you guys read programming books? How do you make the most out of it? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been coding for years in a multitude of languages, but other than one c class I had in college I mostly learned through osmosis, or learned new things as they were needed.

So my knowledge is honestly all over the place and with a ton of gaps.

I'm trying to learn rust and starting going through The Rust Book and afterwards I plan on going on Rust by Example and trying to code my stuff as strictly following best practices as possible.

Is that a waste of time? I mean rawdogging it has been working for me for a decade now. Should I just yolo and write what I wanna write in Rust and learn as I go?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Personally, I like to supplement my knowledge with the occasional book. Like shit, that's sort of the whole point of books.

I don't think a book has ever got me started on something new while programming. Like if I want to pick up a new language or framework, I have better luck going directly to the documentation. If I have a specific problem, then I can search online or find a tutorial or something.

Another risk of using a book as the entry point is when those books go out of date and no longer become relevant. Always make sure they're using the right version of whatever tool you're using, lest you pick up a book vaguely titled "Learn Python" and discover it's for 2.7 when you've installed 3.11

But as you've kind of surmised here, books are great for filling in the gaps in knowledge. They're also generally speaking written by authors with tons of experience (and perhaps biases) which might tell you why things are done a certain way.

Of particular interest - and caution - are opinion-based books. For example, Clean Code is full of examples that sound good on paper, and then when taken to their extreme are shown to be brittle and cumbersome. I still think the book has some good points, but at the end of the day it's opinion, and opposing opinions exist for a reason.

So I guess what I'm saying there is books are great, but you shouldn't follow them dogmatically