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Reading List

NOTE: This is just a start! We need more suggestions! Please Contribute!

The list below is directly lifted from Tamara's Software as a Craft blog's learning page. She's the "I" below.

It has since been updated with various links shared on the Slack channel as of 7/16/2018. These descriptions were written by Kim Thompson.

Please follow our Instagram! <3

General Programming

  • Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving by V. Anton Spraul

    Spraul's purpose in this book is not to teach you how to write a program, but to begin to understand the problem-solving approach that is inherent in good programmers. Like so many skills, programming is driven by the desire and vision of the practitioner. A painter uses brushes, canvas, paints, other media to create a work of art, but it isn't the tools, it isn't the specific techniques, and it isn't even the particular skill the painter has that makes a good work of art; it is their composition, the melding of media and surface, the use of different techniques, and practice in developing the skills that come together to form the work of art. Spraul is going to take you deeper than just the syntax, semantics, and data structures of software to the heart of what makes a good programmer: the ability to creatively find and generate solutions to problems.

  • Learn to Program by Chris Pine

    This book is nearly universally recommended to people new to programming. The original tutorial is available online for free as well: https://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/. Learn to Program was featured on the great webcomic Unshelved.

  • A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander

    You may be wondering why I've included a book on building construction. The answer is quite simple: the concepts in building towns and houses is nearly directly translatable to building software applications and systems. One part of being an excellent craftsperson is being able to apply abstract learning in different problem domains. If you are an expert in writing software, you are almost never going to be solving problems only for other software developers. (You can and should do so, but the client and users are generally non-programmers.) Thus you're most likely going to be working in someone else's domain of expertise. Alexander's views on architecture apply to software architecture as well.

  • Beautiful Code by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson

    A book with a purpose, that isn't a how to code, so much as a how to think about coding. Source of the missive:

    1. Make it correct
    2. Make it pretty
    3. Make it fast

    In that order.

  • System Design Heuristics

    A pay what you want (within reason) book that is being revised on an ongoing basis. It covers a number of design principles.

Object-Oriented Programming

  • 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen.

    A recent book, representing the absolute best by two teachers of software engineering. Sandi has been teaching Object-oriented programming for decades, and Katrina brings in her expertise with refactoring, resulting in a deep book that stretches beyond the basics and deep into the structures and understanding of object systems and idioms. It brings up to date the actual concepts of refactoring, test-driven development, naming things, reducing code "smells" and making code more easily and economically maintainable and sustainable. They take all the buzzwords and unbuzzify them into practical, useful methodologies and techniques.

JavaScript

  • JavaScript: The Good Parts by David Crockford.

    JavaScript is a vast, sprawling language and ecosystem, and has been maligned for much poor code on the web. Crockford extracts out the parts that are really useful, giving the reader a better grounding. This book is the progenitor of many of the JavaScript frameworks that have come up the past few years, including CoffeeScript, TypeScript and other *Script derivatives.

  • You Don't Know JS series by Kyle Simpson.

    A tour de force by one of the great teachers and evangelists of JavaScript, Kyle's "You Don't Know JS" series is a must-read collection of books. You can get the books in raw form on-line at the above address, and you can get the published e-books at your favourite vendor.

  • Eloquent Javascript by Marijn Haverbeke.

    When I was more naive about JS, I wrote a bit of a negative review of this book. Subsequently, I've learned of it's true eloquence and meaning in giving a model of how to organize and implement modern JS. The subtitle "A modern introduction to programming" is still a bit misleading, perhaps, because you have to understand a fair bit of JavaScript and programming to get the message, I feel. But that's just a quibble at this point. Read this before you strike out on creating a client-based JS application; you won't regret it.

  • Get Started with Debugging JavaScript in Chrome DevTools by Kayce Basques

    This basic tutorial for debugging any JavaScript issue in DevTools is available as both an article and a video.

  • JavaScript ES6+: var, let, or const? by Eric Elliot

    A rundown of ES6's alternatives to var, const and let. var is now the weakest signal available. const denotes that the value will never be changed. lets may be reassigned, but can only be used in the block they were defined in.

  • Increment/Decrement

    Added clarification around how ++ and -- work in JavaScript. Basically, if it is put after the variable (e.g. x++), the value will be returned before incrementing. If it is put after the variable (e.g. ++x), the value will be returned after incrementing.

  • Template Literals

    True bliss. No more do we need to do this:

      console.log('Fifteen is ' + (a + b) + ' and\not ' + (2 * a + b) + '.');

    This (which uses backticks instead of quotes) is much more readable:

      console.log(`Fifteen is ${a + b} and not ${2 * a + b}.`);

  • JavaScript Style Guides and Beautifiers by Addy Osmani

    Note from @tamouse:

    The article was written in 2012 though, and if you've heard anything about the JavaScript world, it's that the amount and frequency of change is huge. The tools most often used now are eslint and prettier. Teams use these a lot when working on code to achieve a common style (and to find syntax errors before shipping code!) so no one has to argue about the right style anymore.

    Idiomatic's still big, but Google and AirBnB have overtaken it in time (read more).

React

  • React Developer Roadmap

    A chart that demonstrates the paths you can take and the libraries you might want to learn in order to become a React developer. It should help give you a rough idea of the landscape as it is currently, since it is frequently being updated.

HTML and CSS

  • The New CSS Layout by Rachel Andrew

    This new book by CSS3 Grid contributor Rachel Andrew is the current best explanation and introduction to the new layout systems in CSS3, Grid and Flexbox. A must read!

  • HTML and CSS Design and Build Websites by Jon Duckett

    This book has been recommended by several people in the [GDI] courses I've been helping in. A very visual approach, using full-colour photographs to explain the two declarative languages.

Sass

  • **Sass Color Variables That Don't Suck by Landon Schropp

    Have you ever tried naming colors based on where they were used and found that you ended up using "hamburger-background" in unrelated places? Have you ever simply named the variables after their colors and ended up with this mess:

    $yellow-green: #b0eb00;
$red: #b30015;
$blue: #2a00b3;
$other-blue: #0077b3;
$cyan: #00b0b3;
$transparent-cyan: #24fbff;
$periwinkle: #8a7dff;
$light-gray: #a6a6a6;
$gray: #595959;
$darkish-gray: #444;
$dark-gray: #363636;
$darker-gray: #303030;
$darkest-gray: #292929;
$darkester-gray: #111;

    This is the article for you.

PHP

  • Head-First PHP and MySQL

    Published by O'Reilly, their "Head-First" imprint is intended for people just starting out learning to program. Head-First PHP and MySQL is an entertaining and informative dive into one of the most popular server-side programming languages. After learning HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript, PHP is a great place to jump into writing dynamic web sites that interact with your own data. WordPress, running on 28% of the web (and still growing) is written in PHP.

WordPress

  • Intro to WordPress by Allyson Wehrs

    Slides from one of our courses on Wordpress, explaining what it is, how it is used and how you can get started.

Ruby

  • Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen.

    Olsen's approach in this book is to go far beyond just learning a programming language, but a way to learning the idioms and the "Ruby Way". Even if your chosen language is something other than Ruby, reading this book will give you an appreciation for how to delve into a language and get the most out of it.

  • Confident Ruby by Avdi Grimm

    More than any other book I've read on Ruby, "Confident Ruby" has affected my coding habits more than any other. If Ruby is about making programmers happy, Confident Ruby is about making programming joyful, and not just in the immediate, but being able to look at code you've written in the future and recall the joy. Confident Ruby seeks to combat software rot from the get-go.

  • Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black

    Also known as the "Black Book" (because of the author's name), WGR is the successor to Ruby for Rails by Black that provided me with the much-needed introduction to how to write Ruby code, with the idea of using it in Ruby for Rails. This book is a fabulous primer on the Ruby idioms and expressions that help make one a good Ruby programmer.

  • Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz

    This book provides a deeply-needed introduction to object-oriented design, specifically targeted to the Ruby language. Ruby is one of the richest languages in which to express object-oriented patterns, but it is easy to fall of the OO wagon and start to get things messed up. Sandi provides the thinking tools necessary to decide how to structure your code for better maintainability, extensibility and testability. Comprehension and forward communication of the choices made during software design are crucial to programming, and Sandi is one of the very best at explaining things.

Rails

  • Rails 4 in Action by Ryan Bigg, Yehuda Katz, Steve Klabnik, and Rebecca Skinner.

    A follow-on the highly successful Rails 3 in Action, R4iA has been completely rewritten, with new examples, case study, and all the great new features in Rails 4.

    A great book for beginning Rails developers to start with, and for intermediate developers to step up their game.

  • Practicing Rails by Justin Weiss.

    The first chapter alone (free!) is worth a download and very thorough read. Justin has provided one of the most effective strategies for learning just about anything skill based, and it's especially effective for learning software skills. The focus of the book and the examples and such are obviously Rails, but the first chapter is applicable to learning anything.

  • RailsConf 2018: Actionable Tactics for Leveling Up Junior Devs by Sumeet Jain by Sumeet Jain

    Ain't nobody got time to watch a half hour video, so I'll list the description:

    We are told that junior developers are a secret weapon, but this alleged "competitive advantage" is so elusive! Typical advice about evolving talent can be broad, u-relatable, and impractical. Aren't there any specific and actionable tactics that teams can employ for leveling up new devs? (Yes, there are!)

Git

Web Architecture

  • Web Architecture 101 by Jonathan Fulton

    An article that walks you through how modern web apps tend to be hooked up. It explains what the following things do and how they work together:

    • Domain Name Servers (DNS)
    • Load Balancers
    • Web Application Servers
    • Database Servers
    • Caching Services
    • Job Queues & Servers
    • Services
    • Cloud Storage
    • Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

Accessibility

  • Designing for accessibility is not that hard by Pablo Stanley

    This article describes seven easy-to-implement things you can do that will improve the accessibility of your site. It also talks a bit about the business case for accessibility, and how sites that are designed this way from the ground up tend to see more traffic, be faster and have neater code.

Education

Career Advice

  • [Becoming a 10x Developer](https://kateheddleston.com/blog/becoming-a-10x-developer) by Kate Heddleston

    Ten ways to be a better teammate: the kind of teammate that makes everyone around them 10x better, instead of just being 10x better than everyone else.

  • 88 ways to become better end to end software developer by Leo Kyrpychenko

    Note from @tamouse:

    i thought i'd bring this to folks' attention, not because I'm endorsing this post, but because it lists a bunch of things that can help expand one's desirability for hiring options. As most folk here are still at the early stages of their career, this list is more of a "someday-maybe" sort. If you aren't doing any of these, it's OKAY -- don't fret!

    Plus, piano players don't play all the keys either :)

  • My Lessons from Interviewing 400+ Engineers Over Three Startups

    What Marco Rogers actually looks for when hiring engineers at startups. Key takeaways: soft skills matter, startups don't often know what they're looking for in a candidate yet, interview in three person groups, bring future colleagues into the interview process.

  • Add This To Your Resume After Deleting Your "Objective" Statement by Martin Yate

    We know your objective is to get this job. Not only that, but frames the conversation on what you want from the company rather than what the company in question should want with you. Why not write a Performance Summary or Career Summary instead?

Sexism in the Industry

Mentoring and Volunteering

Security and Surveillance