Hello fellow DEV denizens:
Can someone recommend top notch books in the following areas?:
- PHP (OOP, MVC, CodeIgniter, Laravel)
- JavaScript (AJAX, JQuery, Vue)
- C (Since PHP is entirely written in C)
- Any other books that can move one towards subject mastery.
- How does one become a guru in Linux, C, PHP, JavaScript? (a) What are specific steps for someone with a background in Computer Science (Bsc and Msc)?
Latest comments (4)
You don't need books to get good at programming. There are hundreds of free and paid interactive courses online that teach you things in a much more comprehensive way than books can. Also, you can CTRL+F [you know, search] things much faster.
Look at udemy.com , freecodecamp.org, w3schools.com etc.
For a beginner i recommend you pick a structured course rather than just doing tutorials or you'll get lost in all of it. There is a ton to learn and it continues to grow every day. Many tutorials and courses are crap made by beginners trying to teach before they are ready. We don't know what we don't know, remember that.
Find proven courses that have been around a few years with good reviews and go from there.
As for "how do you become a guru?"
If you already have a background in CS you can probably pick things up faster, in fact you were already taught some of these languages in college and should know the basics to get going a lot faster than most newbies starting from scratch.
It takes experience to get good. No one with less than 5 years experience is great at any language. No one with 5+ years experience on just one platform or at just one company working on one product is gonna be great either. It takes a lot of practice, and building and debugging dozens and hundreds of projects before you can be good at this. To be great takes technical understanding, knowing technical planning, understanding user interfaces, understanding how to debug different platforms/stacks and again all this only comes with experience.
Most people with 10+ years still aren't that good because they've been working on only a handful of projects all that time, they grow stale.
You have to learn new things to keep up, and new things are released daily.
You don't have to know them all, but if you're not learning every day you are falling behind.
Many thanks for your in-depth guidance. Most appreciated.
Here is a good start: github.com/odan/learn-php#books
Thank you very much Lars. Those are great resources.