Any good books that you can recommend specific to a topic/language or in general?

This question was asked in a webcast that was just hosted by @peachesmotorsports! We can share that recording here momentarily, but I thought we could ask this question to you all!

What are your favorite books to supplement your coding learning practice?

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I have several books from No Starch, all of which I’ve found to be quite good. I also have a Packt book, for Android programming with Kotlin which seems alright (what of it I’ve got through so far anyway).

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From the coding perspective, I don’t have a lot of books. Most of what I’ve learned is through courses like the ones from Codecademy or just random tutorials found online. From my perspective, the Codecademy courses are enough to get you started. Once you get started, you just have to keep going.

Courses I’ve taken (not all from Codecademy):

C++
Assembly
Ladder
C#
Ruby
Black Box Testing
JAVA
Javascript
SQL
Mongo
Command Line
Building APIs from scratch
Python

This does not mean that I have mastered all those languages, it means I’m proficient and that at some point I had to use that language to complete a project for school or work. I learned what I needed, I used it and it served its purpose, I moved on. This is why I keep saying that you need to be flexible, as an example Javascript will never be a substitute for Assembly or Ladder. Each application has a language that is better suited for it.

Here are the few books I have and have found useful for my career:

  • How to win friends & influence people, Dale Carnegie -> this book was useful when transitioning to a leader\management role, it was recommended by a friend who is a manager

  • The Selenium Guidebook, Dave Haffner -> I failed many times at software automation, this book taught me what I needed to succeed

  • Cucumber & Cheese - A tester’s workshop, Jeff Morgan -> taught me why my initial implementation of Cucumber failed and how to do it properly

The other books I have are related to DevOps which are out of scope for this community.

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I’m not sure someone else here will find this useful, but I’ll say it anyways lol.

The first coding language I learned was Python, when I was around 11 years old. So…I used the Coding Club Python books and a Python For Children book. They are honestly so fun; they made me fall in love with coding. (And let’s be honest who doesn’t love creating some cool games?). The satisfaction sensation each time I completed a project was so amazing, and it just really encouraged me to keep going.

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Some of my favorites:

  • The C Programming Language
  • Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++
  • HTML & CSS: Design and Build Websites
  • Think ___ Series
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Beginning Javascript (McPeak/Wilton) and Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript (Nixon) are thick, textbook type books that I’m finding extremely helpful. They supply so much more detail and practice actually coding in my own editor. However, doing the courses here first was valuable to get me started.

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