Ben Halpern

I usually recommend a few different books:

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

http://amzn.to/2vcRcgU

This book really helped me focus on code organization and seeing maintainable code as an overall goal whilst building long-term applications. I'd say that one of the reasons why the work I've done 3-4 years ago can still be used, expanded, and maintained today is because of this book. Short functions, code organization, and naming conventions all stuck with me.

I'd say that unlike other programming books, this one focuses on the "art" and "organization" rather than syntax and other aspects of programming.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

http://amzn.to/2vfeUaT

This book tackled real-world application building and practices. I'm still reading it. I liked how it tackled not only some basics of programming (resource management practices) but also project management to a certain extent. Eg. how to use prototypes, how to use "trace bullet" programs, etc.

Game Programming Patterns

I think one of my favorites has been "Game Programming Patterns" http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ which is free online or you can get an ebook/print version http://amzn.to/2veRdiO

The book introduces several basic design patterns, it explains WHY they're used, how to implement them, etc. in the best way I've read so far. No CS book or online article has been able to explain these patterns as this book did.

And I'm not even a game developer.

Also, check…

Just imagine if instead of sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into poorly specced APIs with horrible usability like service workers[1] browser devs would instead implement something that apps actually need: proper UI controls and components.

I keep saying: there's a reason all the CSS and UI frameworks on the web re-implement the same paltry dozen of the most primitive components and rarely if ever tackle anything complex.

https://open-ui.org is too little too late.

[1] To quote Dan Abramov, https://dev.to/ben/why-the-react-community-is-missing-the-point-about-web-components-1ic3

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React users would love to not have to npm install a date picker and bloat their bundles! If they need to "use the platform" then why doesn't that platform ship the features they actually ask for? Instead of a carousel they get an aside. Features like service workers are touted as a solution to many problems in the web, but their ergonomics are so under-designed that people actually have to change domains to bust the cache from a broken build (I’m not making this up).

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I don't know if it's due to my familiarity with Rust, but I find none of the examples cursed or surprising, except the "&* is useful" one. Even for that one, I think the use case of "turning a raw pointer to a reference" actually requires unsafe, and so it's imo a bit misleading to omit that fact.

All this is unlike a language i work with in my day job (and hence one would expect that I'd not find surprising), and yet I find so much behavior utterly baffling: https://dev.to/ben/what-is-the-oddest-javascript-behavior-4dh2

First of all, don't use ChatGPT for that. Use full GPT-3, specifically the code models (ie. code-davinci-002).

ChatGPT is a subset & tweak of the full GPT-3 model to make a good chatbot, and it's actually less capable than the full model.

It's strange to me that people are going crazy over ChatGPT when GPT-3 has been out for months now.

More info on the difference between ChatGPT and GPT-3: https://dev.to/ben/the-difference-between-chatgpt-and-gpt-3-19dh