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My Best Lockdown Reads

A lockdown can be depressing but it is also an opportunity to take stock of your skills and be up to date.

Keeping up to date and constantly improving is part of the job of a software engineer. Here is a short list of books that I went through which I believe will help other software engineers reduce their WTF (What The F**k) Per Minute

1. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

I hate spaghetti code with passion, if you are like me you will love this book. This is a great book to learn of best practices to produce clean, readable code and avoid code smells.

Writing maintainable and readable code is not a luxury — it is something every good software engineer should aspire to. This book will have a positive impact on the way you see and write code.

2. The Pragmatic Programmer

Beside good reviews and recommendations what really drew me to this book is the title. Pragmatic means dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations. In the software engineering field being practical is more important than being theoretical and it is one of the core I always strive for in my career.

3. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

It is hard to always deliver high-quality code sometimes we write code running against impossible deadline and compromises are made. If these compromises are not handled this might lead to technical debt.

That’s why refactoring is so important. If we couldn’t provide quality the first time, we can improve it later for better maintainability. Martin Fowler (one of my idols in the world of software development) describes the best techniques for an effective refactoring.

What about the library?

Getting books is one thing but being able to have stored in an orderly manner is equally important. Check out the Calibre

Calibre is a powerful and easy to use e-book manager. Users say it’s outstanding and a must-have. It’ll allow you to do nearly everything and it takes things a step beyond normal e-book software. It’s also completely free and open source and great for both casual users and computer experts.

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