What Programming Book Should I Read Next?

Jim Hewes via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun Jul 27 08:15:30 PDT 2014


On 7/26/2014 5:58 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> I've to say, that learning D and contributing to D has greatly expanded
> my programming horizons. I've been doing C/C++ for about 2 decades, and
> about 8 years ago I felt I'd started to taper off in terms of learning
> new things in programming. Until I found D, that is. D made hard /
> complex things in C++ easy, and opened up new horizons -- like weak
> purity, range-based component programming, new possibilities in
> metaprogramming, etc..
>
> Contributing to Phobos was also quite eye-opening in learning about
> novel ways of handling common tasks in a standard library. I daresay I
> learned more contributing to Phobos than from my full-time job (mainly C
> with some C++ and a smattering of Javascript, PHP, and some other
> stuff).
>
>
> T
>
Sorry if this is too off-topic, please tell me if so. As I read the D 
newsgroup I notice that a lot of you guys who are really quite 
knowledgeable about languages are doing things like C programming as a 
day job.

I recently (like 2 weeks ago) resigned my current job of over 10 years. 
One of the reasons is that the work has veered too far from why I got 
into this career in the first place. The code for the product, in C++, 
has been largely finished (by me) so the only coding I do is small 
modifications to it. Mostly what I do now is what follows that: 
customizations for OEM customers, Windows installers, rebuilding the 
product, testing, testing, certification testing. There are more issues, 
but I'll spare you :-).

I do try to learn more about things like Haskell and D and 
meta-programming and ranges, etc., but there isn't so much time when 
your regular job takes up over 40 hours a week.  With programming, I 
feel like you can read about something but you can't really be 
proficient at it until you use it hands-on and practice it regularly. So 
I think it helps to try to find a job where you can do some of that 
during work time. I hope to do that. But then I read here where a lot of 
you guys have day jobs not even doing C++ but C programming, I feel like 
some of you are in the same boat, and more so because you're more 
knowledgeable than me.

So how do you feel about that?

Jim




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