It is a common misconception that to be programmer one should read lots of books. It is as wrong as to say that in order to learn to swim or ride a bicycle one should read books instead of trying.
Only code by the very best people (Abelson & Sussman, Norvig, PG, Armstrong, Marlow, Odersky) is worth reading. Common crap found on blogs (especially about Haskell or Lisp) or github (especially PHP and Ruby code) does only damage by giving a very wrong impression of what programming is really.
There is a good hint: read the standard library of "extraordinary" programming languages - Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, Erlang, Scala and, sigh.. Clojure)
But the very same law holds for any art, be it poetry or music composition, or fiction - 95% is just stuff, a mediocre crap.
btw, ''The Mythical Man-Month'' has no code in it.) And the first two chapters of ''The Programmers Stone'' (which are the only worth reading) has no code in it also.
There is some value in being able to read non-expert code, you're more likely to run into non-expert code during your day to day job. Someone like Abelson, or Armstrong, will write clearer almost effortless code. Someone at work may spend a thousand lines trying to munge an associative array out of a database result. You have to be able to read both.
Only code by the very best people (Abelson & Sussman, Norvig, PG, Armstrong, Marlow, Odersky) is worth reading. Common crap found on blogs (especially about Haskell or Lisp) or github (especially PHP and Ruby code) does only damage by giving a very wrong impression of what programming is really.
There is a good hint: read the standard library of "extraordinary" programming languages - Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, Erlang, Scala and, sigh.. Clojure)
But the very same law holds for any art, be it poetry or music composition, or fiction - 95% is just stuff, a mediocre crap.
btw, ''The Mythical Man-Month'' has no code in it.) And the first two chapters of ''The Programmers Stone'' (which are the only worth reading) has no code in it also.