Improving Programming Skills

Write more code. Learn different languages. Reinvent wheels. Stop following the herd. Most of the people who's code you're admiring have been blazing their own trails for decades. There are no short cuts to experience. Good luck!

You're not missing anything. It starts out that (code is crap) and you just get better the more stuff you write , and even then you never quite feel like you're writing "good code".The biggest thing that accelerated my growth was working with people who were much much better than I was. You'll learn so much faster, and become so much better than you can ever by just plugging away by yourself.Just remain humble and open to learning and you'll wake up one day an

There is no shortcut to get better. You have to write software. Write, write and write again.Take part in different kind of apps. Small web apps, big and complex web apps, simple mobile apps or more complex mobile apps. Each of these will teach you on how to think and organize your work. Try learning different programming languages for example Clojure, python, ruby, javascript, C#, java and haskell. You don't need become an expert but each language will teach you a different way to tackle pro

1. Sharpen your saw. Keep learning new technologies and programming methodologies.2. Make an effort to use what you have learned from past experiences to write better code in terms of usability, efficiency, readability, maintainability, etc.3. Read Code(good ones). Sometimes, looking at other people's code allows you to have a fresh perspective about coding style.4. Contribute to open source. It will help you immensely in understanding what it takes to write code that others can read an

When you cannot work with other experience people or participate in open-source projects. Try these things.1. Take a task and implement it in the most laziest way (like implementing everything in a single code file)2. Try to make the implementation "look beautiful" (with proper indentation, etc)3. Try to make the instructions in your code analyze the return codes, check the input parameters to functions, catch exceptions, split them into various files, functions, classes etc b

Coding. Coding. More Coding. You spend a lot of time working on problems. You learn to generalize. You save and reuse code. You go off and try stuff and make mistakes.You read less tutorials, but you actually try to implement more stuff you read about, instead of reading it.You learn from people. Those who know more, those who know different, those who study CS and those who study art, psychology, gerontology, whatever.You go over what you learn. You teach, you tutor, you explain,

Go fly a kite.Programmers who only do programming, suck at programming. You can't get perspective by sitting still. You have to expose yourself to new things.Learn how to sail. Take up stamp collecting. Grow exotic flowers in teacups. Earn a black belt. Become a baker. Go to a lindy hop dance night on the weekend. Take apart and put together an engine. Learn a new language. Travel the world.After all that, programming will seem like a walk in the park. You'll probably get bore

Never give up on goals you still care about. Get a beer and some notepaper. Write down some notes about how you can be a better programmer. Think about topics slightly out of the domain - how you represent ideas, how you explain ideas to people, how you try to understand ideas that are explained to you, how you read code. Think about how you can improve. Think about some deliberate practice exercises. Take what's useful from doubters and ignore the rest. You'll get there.

I've been coding for about 15 years, and these are the strategies that work best for me:1. If the framework or language contains paradigms that are new to you, start by getting a learn-by-doing book like a pragmatic programmer guide, and work your way all the way through it.2. Start doing little projects that are personally relevant to you. These can be anything: little math problems from projecteuler, data analysis problems, technical interview questions. Which projects you choose ar

The best way to get better at writing code [or prose] is to read and write more code [or prose]. Start a project, or two, or three, or twelve and write some code.So what if you didn't learn Python and Go in a few hours? Try Lua or Boo or Rust or Scala or MUMPS or Smalltalk or Erlang next. Load up Node and write some JavaScript code. Download Eclipse and give Java a whirl.Find something you like. Then worry about learning it. Because it will take ten years.<a href="http://norvig.com