The book that every coder should read

Steven Braham
Steven’s Blog
Published in
4 min readSep 5, 2017

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Even when on vacation, I still try to continue learning new things.

Nowadays, there are a lot of resources for programmers. You have YouTube series teaching how to code, blog posts telling you how to improve your workflow and LinkedIn pages with career tips. What is missing, is one comprehensive guide that contains everything a coder needs in his or her career, from the rookie apprentice to the senior dev with decades of experience.

Luckily John Sonmez, a popular blogger and consultant, has now created the “Complete software developer career guide.” I read the book during my vacation in late August and was baffled by the structure and scope of this book. I think that every developer should read at least a part of this book. There are of course some criticisms at this book, but first I will tell about the good parts of this book.

The good parts

The structure

First of all, this book follows a unique approach for structuring content. All the chapters and sections in this book are independent entities that can be read in any order and there is no need to read them all. This means you aren’t forced to read the entire book. You can just pick the things you like from the table of contents. Only care to know how to attract clients as a freelancer? No problem, just read that chapter only. You don’t need any knowledge of chapter x to read y.

The thing I like the most about the book is that the intro even contains a guide for what you should read depending on your interests and skill level. For example, the first half of the book is focused on learning to code and getting your first job. I have been coding for nearly a decade and the intro recommend me to start in the middle.

The intro even discourages starting at the beginning and reading the whole book cover to cover.

A wide range of topics

This book is massive and I really mean massive. The edition I bought from Amazon, was nearly 800 pages long. The book contains literally everything you could encounter in your career. It even has a whole chapter dedicated to dressing tips. Overall, I think that Mr. Sonmez did a pretty good job in selecting topics for this book. He also made sure to write his content as timeless as possible. This means that, in theory, you could still use this book in a decade or two without having to worry about it containing outdated tech.

He also includes some sort of FAQ in each chapter that deals with common questions, complaints or counter arguments for the topic that was discussed in the chapter. Each chapter is also filled with real world examples from his own career and the mistakes he made along the way.

Career toolkit

The book is accompanied by an online product called the Digital Toolkit. I haven’t had time yet to download it, but it seems like a follow-up companion to the book. The toolkit contains a skill assessment guide that allows you check how up to date your skillset is and helps you identifying knowledge gaps.

The bad parts

Massive self-promotion

Ultimately the goal of this book is, of course, generating awareness for his media platform “Simple programmer”. The book is filled with links to his blog. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. His blog often contains good content and I would probably do the same if I wrote a book.

However, I would have liked it a bit more if Mr. Sonmez linked more to other resources that aren’t affiliated with him or his friends. His previous book, Soft Skills, was a bit more balanced in my opinion on this matter. It just feels a bit spammy sometimes.

Some topics don’t go deep enough (if you mind that)

Like I said before, this book is massive. A downside of putting so many different topics in one book is that there isn’t much room for going deeply.

This means, that after reading this book, you know a bit of everything, but I recommend reading other resources on the things you found puzzling or interesting.

Of course, it’s entirely up to you if you mind that. If you like a broad and quick grasp of various topics then this book is perfect for you.

Conclusion

Despite some shortcomings, I still find this one of the best informative books I’ve ever read.

Probably the most important unique selling of this book, is the structure. This makes this book really accessible to both the rookie that is starting out and the professional who doesn’t care about which language he needs to learn, but wants to know how to get promoted. I hope that other book will learn from this book and become more “modular”.

If you are interested in this book, you can buy it on Amazon.

About the author

I’m a freelancer web developer and online marketer from the Netherlands. I’m specialized in creating and optimizing websites where the focus is user experience. In may 2017, I was included in the list of the TOP 500 young innovators by the Next Web. If you want to reach out, please contact me on Twitter or check my LinkedIn:

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Web development and online marketing consultant. 2017 TOP 500 Dutch IT talents. Skills: PHP, Ruby on Rails, Wordpress and Adwords. Check out https://braham.biz