Books to Complement Your Skills
The learning never stops as a software developer. If you’ve recently learned how to program, you may be asking yourself what else should you be reading. What else is there to learn? A lot more…trust me. Below are some of the books that I personally recommend for junior-to-mid-level developers to read aside from their regular programming content.
If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I love Head First books. With the Design Patterns book, it’s time for you to broaden your thinking. For example, let’s say that you start writing code in Laravel. You’ll see concepts such as Facades, Factories, and Observers. What are they? They’re design patterns. If you know your design patterns, you won’t have to spend hours trying to figure out what they do in Laravel.
On your team, you’ll always have that one individual that’s just incredible in Git. They understand the concept and the entire pipeline just runs smoother. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone understood git well enough past the most basic commands?
Software Developers have an innate desire to be treated as professionals. The code of conduct teaches them how.
Programming skills will get you hired. Soft skills will keep you advancing in your career. This is what you need to learn to make more money quickly.
Working with legacy code is just part of the job. The sooner you understand how to cope with it, the better. Having a systematic approach to legacy code is an important progression for the developer to achieve.
What does it mean to be agile? Daily Stand-Ups? Ability to adapt? Take a look at this book. The author does a great job explaining the agile approach for software development.
The sooner you understand what most companies want, the better your career will be. Most companies want product out the door asap. Following the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach is going to make everyone happy and you more money. It takes a lot of maturing to get to this level of understanding.
Containerization is here and it’s the future. The more you understand Docker concepts, the easier your journey as a developer will be. In my opinion, anything that can be containerized should be, for the developer sake.
Rarely will you have an application that doesn’t tie into an API. Understanding the API Design Pattern concepts will make consuming API data and creating your own much simpler.
A book for when you undoubtedly get yourself stressed out. I’ve come back to this book over and over again. The message is simple, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff.