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Jessica Veit
Jessica Veit

Posted on • Edited on

Abandon the digital world

Call me old school, but I love reading books - actual books like the ones you use offline. And call me nerdy, but I love coding. Combine these two activities and you are going to end up with amazing titles.

I believe that, next to the always present argument that reading trains your brain, holding these sources of information in your hand as physical object has a completely different effect on you and your brain.
I have been reading the books “Clean Code” and “Clean Architecture” both written by Robert C. Martin over the course of the last few weeks, and although many things he writes about seem to be trivial, you really need to read or at least hear about some topics so you actually start paying attention to those things mentioned. In “Clean Code” for example he talks about comments. Sure, I know that sounds like something you would at most write three sentences about, but there is a total of 20 pages dedicated to this topic. There are things the light still needs to touch for you, details that you were oblivious to.

Learning how to code, understanding how to use the right keywords at the right spot, being able to translate your thoughts into a programming language of your choice and being able to debug this pile of lines you produced after discovering a bug, is just the fundamental understanding you had to build up. Now we are not just talking about code, we are talking about code of which you can say:

“It works, and I know why! That is the next level and you want to reach it. “

This kind of quality content, providing such a degree of depth into the topics it covers, is barley found in an article or a tutorial. These titles have an awesome build up and really set the scene for you with all the fundamentals first, get you in the right mood if you so will, before throwing the complex stuff at you. This is something you cannot do within a five-hundred-word blog or even a thirty-minute YouTube video. Be honest, how many times do you end up with thousands of tabs opened in your browser only to google some concept or technical term you did not know and completely lost yourself within a tutorial on how to get started with entity framework and the Wikipedia page of newton’s flaming laser sword? Also, who just looked up the sword?

That being said, I encourage you, no matter if you are a beginning or even more than just an advanced developer, treat yourself with a delightful book, a hot cup of coffee and start reading today!

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