
Ask HN: Do you have to read a lot as a programmer? - Onixelen
Not just code, I mean a lot of text in English. Can you rely mostly on videos, if you have a hard time reading, and minimize reading to small amount of text?
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mspaulding06
There's some you can learn from videos and other tutorials, but really you
need to read books. You need to read books and you need to write a lot of
code. Coding teaches you how to be better at coding, but reading books teaches
you what your code actually means. Reading is where you learn the terminology
you need to know to really understand what's going on in your code. It also
helps you to be a better communicator with other programmers. Programmers who
don't read books can't communicate to other programmers what their programs
do. Being a good communicator is part of being a good programmer. So yes, read
books, lots of them.

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samblr
Yes. Over a career - one will learn lot of frameworks, languages,
technologies, tools - before jumping to code - there is sometimes dense
documentation to go through. At time this can be daunting as things might be
poorly documented (eg mongoose documentation).

A handy trick is to make small diagrams of your readings - it can be as simple
as writing a timing diagram of calls while reading documentation. This kinds
of expands on what one reads - I found them really useful. Also, first search
in google images - eg: you want to understand "angular architecture" \-
usually first few of images will be very relevant to grasp things in a
abstract way. By doing this first you get component names and how they are
connected (by seeing the image) then you read documentation - you kind of know
what documentation is trying to tell now.

Understanding meaning of words are important if you are non-native speakers.
Say there is a word you have never come across eg: convolution neural
networks. One needs to know 'convolution' means then 'neural networks' before
going any further.

So the key takeaway I feel is how quickly can one abstract new concepts or
relate them to what is known or build new models of understanding.

~~~
samblr
\+ add google dictionary extension on chrome - double click any word will tell
meaning of it.

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flukus
Yes, there is a lot of reading involved. Educational sources, bug reports,
commit messages, logs, documentation and code itself, these all require
reading and are things you have to do multiple times a day.

As far as having a hard time reading, could you be more specific? I'm a very
slow reader myself (can listen to an audiobook faster than I can read the same
book) and it's not something that's ever worried me professionally.

~~~
Onixelen
> As far as having a hard time reading, could you be more specific?

I read slow, like you mentioned, and have lack of confidence in my ability to
read.

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a-saleh
As I slowly advance in my career, I have realized I need to write a lot as
well. Most of the conversations within my teams are done in text:

* irc chat * slack chat * email * wiki with shared information * issues * specification documents

My greatest achievement past three months was not a piece of code but a 2700
word document describing our new testing process.

