

How can I best fill out my unsystematic coding skills? - baudolino

I&#x27;m now in my mid-twenties and I&#x27;ve been coding on and off for about fifteen years. I started with Perl and C (now long since forgotten) and work mainly now in PHP. I work in project management at an international research organization, and I&#x27;ve been put able to put my limited skills to use building applications using the LAMP stack with JavaScript and JQuery on the front end. I also do a lot of analysis stuff with Stata. This is all pretty elementary to a trained programmer.<p>The thing is, my knowledge is really unsystematic and I lack familiarity with many fundamental CS concepts. Yes, I write apps that work— I&#x27;ve created complex applications on my own and for work, and I pride myself on finding creative technical solutions to challenges within my organization.<p>But I have lots of ideas for things I want to build, and I want to build them the right way. I&#x27;m worried that I&#x27;ll pick the wrong tools and write bad code, and make security and execution mistakes that better coders would laugh at. I don&#x27;t have the time to study CS intensively or to take a more formal coding class. I don&#x27;t want to be a professional programmer, necessarily— I just want to be able to execute my ideas in a more professional way.<p>Any advice is welcome.
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papaf
Don't worry about picking the wrong tools - everybody does that and a CS
education won't help.

If you want an informal coding education, I 100% recommend Code Complete [1].
Its an old book but absolutely fantastic. Please give it a try.

If you want to improve your CS education, Google (the company not the search
engine) recommends interviewees read Introduction to Algorithms before their
interview and do practice problems on Topcoder [3].

    
    
        [1] http://www.stevemcconnell.com/cc.htm
        [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/introduction-algorithms
        [3] https://www.topcoder.com/

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lynn729
Great Suggustions to help improve skills

